Everything I used to know about Aaron Burr I learned from the 1993 milk commercial in which a man was offered $10,000 if he could answer the question “Who shot Alexander Hamilton?” Like thousands of parents today, however, I now know more than I ever thought I would about Burr, John Laurens and Hercules Mulligan. This is because I live with someone who eats, sleeps and breathes the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Hamilton. For over six months now, I’ve been parenting a Hamilteen.

Hamilteens are a growing legion of teenage devotees to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway show, which won 11 Tony awards earlier this month, and a Pulitzer before that. They play the music non-stop, know the lyrics by heart and burst into songs from the show at the slightest provocation. All around the country, they’re singing about debt plans, Federalist papers and lines like: “You’re gonna need congressional approval and you don’t have the votes.”

What’s more extraordinary is that many Hamilteens can tell you everything about the show except what it’s like to see it: until this fall, it’s only on at a single Broadway theatre, where tickets are almost impossible to come by. These fans have fallen in love sight unseen and it doesn’t seem to detract from their experience an iota. “You don’t really miss anything by not seeing it, other than just seeing it happen,” says Oona Woodbury, 14, from San Francisco. “But by listening to it you can hear the whole story.

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Hamilton surely marks the first time that multitudes of fans have been consumed by a Broadway musical they have not attended. Yet long before Hamilton was a piece of musical theater, Miranda described his work-in-progress as a concept album, The Hamilton Mixtape. There is very little dialogue that is not sung and really, the genius is in the words. (After all Miranda did win the Tony for best book.) Also, thanks to annotated lyric websites, YouTube-able cast interviews and Miranda’s minutiae-abundant bestselling companion book, there is plenty of supplementary material to stoke fans’ obsessions besides the show itself.

Just as pop fandom is at its most intense along teenagers, so it goes with Hamilteens: the most ardent fans are 14-year-old girls, their obsessions spread virally within their tightly knit peer groups. They are fans like Elizabeth Posnanski (who likes to be called Eliza now, after Eliza Hamilton) who was hounded by friends to listen to the cast album but figured it would be boring because its about the founding fathers. When she finally succumbed, she remembers thinking: “Whoa, this is like crazy cool. This is the best thing ever.” Even though the 46-track recording is nearly two and a half hours long, when it got to the end, “I’m like, wait; you can’t end it there, there has to be more of this, I want another song.”

Compared with what else is out there, “Hamilton is a pretty cool obsession,” says Elizabeth’s father Joe Posnanski, a sportswriter for NBC. Posnanski cherishes his and his daughter’s shared passion for the show, observing that, at 14, kids are beginning to shut out their parents. Posnanski hasn’t had this type of bonding experience with his daughter since Harry Potter, another cultural phenomenon where “you can immerse yourself into a world and there’s never not something to talk about”.

Last month, Posnanski blogged about taking Elizabeth to see Hamilton and shared it on Twitter. The tweet went viral in a matter of hours and by later that night, Miranda himself, the show’s creator and star had retweeted it. “Sobbing reading this in my dressing room after a long week,” Miranda wrote. “Thanks Joe. Thanks Elizabeth,” he added. When Posnanski showed this to Elizabeth, she began to sob.

My own daughter began to sob around the same time, when I had to tell her Miranda would be leaving the show 16 days before we will be seeing it next month. (The crying commenced again this week when news hit that Leslie was going too, in addition to Phillipa Soo.) “Everyone says that his understudy is an even better singer but that’s not the point at all,” said Phoebe Milvy-Soloff, my 14-year-old daughter. “That’s why I like him, because his voice is not perfect and that gives it more feeling and emotion and it sounds more real.” (Last week, Miranda lost the best performer Tony to his castmate, Leslie Odom Jr, who plays Burr.)

The imaginations of these kids have been captured by the realness, the emotion and the flaws of our country’s founding fathers. “If you’re thinking about the American Revolution, you just think of people fighting and then writing the Declaration of Independence,” Phoebe says. “I thought all the founding fathers were really best friends. You wouldn’t think that they had love triangles and feelings.”

Hamilteen mania may also strike around age 14 because eighth grade is when the children begin to study the American constitution and the revolution in greater depth. Many kids were turned on to the musical by a teacher who showed them the YouTube video of Miranda debuting The Hamilton Mixtape at a White House event in 2009, a work which grew into the musical. As Miranda told Newsweek: “The No 1 YouTube comment has been: ‘My teacher showed us this.’”

Addie Matteson, an Indiana librarian who teaches “Hamilessons” wrote, “as a teaching tool it’s darn near perfect”. She says the kids are excited because its gripping story is told in the language they can relate to. “It’s so densely packed with meaning and information, it requires a near obsession to understand it all. It’s a challenge to listen to, and I think kids are absolutely thirsty for things that are fun and make them think at the same time.”

Oona said her drama teacher showed the class a YouTube video. “She was talking about how it was a great thing because mostly people of color were in it and it was kind of reclaiming white history and that it was a new kind of musical and very few new musicals have of been done in that style before.”

If you follow the hashtag #EduHam you’ll see how thrilled middle school teachers are to have a living, breathing, rapping story about flawed founding fathers as an educational resource. As Barack Obama said during an unprecedented video appearance at the Tonys, the musical is a “civics lesson our kids can’t get enough of”. And during his acceptance speech, Leslie Odom Jr praised Miranda: “He made these dead white guys make sense in the context of our time, with our music.” It’s worth remembering that the last time these 14-year-olds had a white president they were six. Dead white guys are even mustier to this generation.

The women too are seen in a new light. When Renée Elise Goldsberry accepted her Tony for her role as Angelica Schuyler, she said: “We get to show who the founding mothers are and they’re not just sewing flags.” As women of the revolution, the Schuyler sisters are a revelation; strong, vulnerable and smart. Nothing is less Betsy Ross than Goldberry’s Satisfied, about love and sisterhood and not getting your heart’s desire.

Girls are not the only Hamilteens. “It’s about war, young men stealing cannons, shooting guns,” says New York-based young-adult author Mariah Fredericks. Her nine-year-old son, Griffin, got hooked after listening to the King George songs: “He loves the verbal bravado.” In You’ll be Back, King George’s comic Fatal Attraction type song to the America who spurned him, the King sings: “I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”

You’ll be Back hooked 14-year-old Miles Buhrmann too. For his Hamilton pilgrimage to New York, he visited Hamilton’s Trinity church grave site, read the Federalist Papers on his iPhone while his mom had a pint at the Fraunces Tavern (mentioned in the stage directions) and went to the theater six times to get dollar bills autographed. They saw “huge numbers of teenaged girls” who broke into song with “rapid-fire recitations”. But Miles prefers the musical’s nuance.

It goes without saying that kids love the show because of the epic rap battles, burns, and braggadocio. They can rap them faster than most grownups can think and practice the raps together, almost like a sport. The biggest challenge of all is to master Guns and Ships, widely recognized as the fastest rap in Broadway history. As the Marquis de Lafayette, Daveed Diggs (who won a Tony) raps 19 words in just three seconds. If you’re a teen, it’s something to emulate.

The accessibility of the cast also lends itself to fandom. Many are available for autographs and hugs and perform at Ham4Ham, an outdoor show for those waiting for the nightly ticket lottery. The actors are young and much hunkier than their currency counterparts. This, no doubt, fans the Hamilton flame. Many of the stars share backstage and offstage moments on social media and the kids who follow them get to know them, in candid, unscripted snippets. Instead of Harry, Liam, Louis and Niall, it’s Lin, Leslie, Christopher and Daveed.

Many of the actors are on Twitter. “You can’t discount the effect that Miranda’s presence on social media has had on the phenomenon,” said Emily Nahmanson, an adult Hamilfan who spearheaded the San Francisco chapter of Hamiltunes, a karaoke-type event catching fire in bars around the country. Her last event drew over 200 attendees. Like many of the kids, these avid fans have not seen the musical.

Another beautiful thing for parents of teen Hamilton soundtrack fans is that the kids are listening to, not watching the story unfold. With so much time spent in front of screens, kids are imagining the action as they listen to the story. Then of course, they pick up their screens and share videos of themselves rapping 19 words in three seconds.