Fresh off his award-winning musical “In the Heights,” Lin-Manuel Miranda traveled to the White House in 2009. He was expected to perform something from his groundbreaking musical about three days in the lives of Latinos and African-Americans living in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. Instead, to the surprise of his audience, he began with a very different song — the first (and at that point, possibly only) song that would grow into “Hamilton.”

Some seven years later, “Hamilton,” Miranda’s stunning hip-hop treatise about the life of the Founding Father, is a worldwide phenomenon. On Friday, Oct. 21, PBS premiered a documentary that traces the origins of this phenomenon — and those of its fascinating subject, first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. It tackles the question: What is it like in “Hamilton’s America”?

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The story of a man who died in 1804 is surprisingly contemporary — and the documentary features commentary from a number of modern public figures, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, President Obama, and even former President George W. Bush. Each had something to say about the historical impact of Alexander Hamilton — framing Miranda’s musical in light of its extraordinary protagonist.

Warren, not surprisingly, praised Hamilton’s emphasis on a centralized government system and his belief in an “aggressive role for government to help build an economy.” (Warren helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government agency that seeks to protect consumers from abuses in the financial sector.) Former Treasury Secretary Paulson, meanwhile, referred to Hamilton as “the patron saint of Wall Street.”

While not all of this is covered in the musical, the particular battle over the role of government in assuming states’ debts (which eventually led to the Compromise of 1790) is considerable and is staged as a rap battle between Thomas Jefferson (Daveed Diggs) and Hamilton (Miranda). The conflict between the fiscally solvent Southerners and Hamilton’s government-control ethos finally ends in a song called “The Room Where It Happens” — sung by Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), who is notably left out of the conversation.

Related: How Genius Struck the ‘Hamilton’ Creator

Standing in the Morris-Jumel Mansion, which once belonged to Burr and was the site of the iconic cabinet dinner where this conflict was discussed, Miranda noted, “The fight they had across this table are the fights we’re still having.”

“The Room Where It Happens” was actually written in the mansion — in Aaron Burr’s bedroom, no less. But as is the case with even many contemporary political dealings — as noted by Hillary Clinton’s admission of both a public and private persona and recently revealed by WikiLeaks — much of the actual substantial work of government took place behind closed doors.

“Hamilton’s America” goes to lengths to discuss the historical veracity of Miranda’s musical; it also talks about the nature of the musical itself, namely its roots in hip-hop and musical theater. Miranda’s response to reading Ron Chernow’s “Hamilton” biography was to immediately frame it in this context. Of the conflict between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, he said, “This is a hip-hop story,” one analogous to the conflict between Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.

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Just like that conflict, Burr and Hamilton’s story ended in tragedy — and gun violence.

Related: ‘Hamilton’ Sweeps Tony Awards

Miranda took his inspiration from 1990s rap and hip-hop artists like the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas, obsessed with “expanding … the real estate that hip-hop can cover.” By framing the story of Hamilton and Burr (who introduces himself in the musical as “the damn fool that shot him”) as this dynamic war between egos — one ambitious but cautious, the other brilliant but callous — Miranda was able to humanize historical figures in a largely unprecedented way.

“I think that our show is doing a really good job of reminding us that all of us are more than one thing,” said Odom Jr., whose portrayal of Burr garnered him a 2016 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. Heck, the musical even touches on the Reynolds scandal, in which the married Hamilton had a year-long affair with a young woman and paid blackmail money to her husband. He then proceeded to publicize the entire sex scandal in a 95-page pamphlet designed to prove that he’d used his own money for blackmail payments, rather than the government’s money.

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The show culminates in the 1804 Burr-Hamilton duel in Weehawken, New Jersey (because dueling was illegal in New York and, according to the show, “everything is legal in New Jersey”). The song “Your Obedient Servant” reads like a lengthy, articulate Twitter war that eventually escalates to guns — and this is apparently not too far off, as the documentary shows Odom Jr. and Miranda reading aloud the exchange of letters preceding the duel. They noted there were multiple instances in which either party could have backed off, but history knows how the duel ended — with Alexander Hamilton buried outside Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, and Vice President Aaron Burr vilified for the remainder of his days.

“Hamilton” has earned almost universal praise, grabbing an unprecedented 16 Tony nominations and winning 11, including Best Musical. It was also the recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama — while its creator, Miranda, was named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow (the MacArthur Fellowship is commonly known as the MacArthur “Genius” Grant). The play begins its first national tour next year.

The documentary “Hamilton’s America” can be seen online at PBS.