With any piece of writing, you're hoping that it will change something, and it seldom does.
— Ron Chernow
I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical. I think I can safely say that that's the last thing I would have expected.
I just have been so surprised and delighted with what has happened with 'Hamilton.' It really has been one of the most enchanting experiences of my life.
Unless we know where we've been as a country, we don't know where we are or where we are going.
In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
Hamilton was extremely combative. Not only was he combative, but he also overreacted to anything he perceived as a threat or a criticism.
I always sympathize with people who complain about the length of my books. It would take me a year to get through one of them.
I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson's masterly saga, 'The Warmth of Other Suns.'
After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.
Partly because his life ended before the age of 50, Hamilton was defined by the other founding fathers, and he managed, with amazing consistency, to alienate most of them.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.
We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.
When the market is just going up, up, and up, we all tend to be blind to the holes in the market. They're all papered over by the rise.
Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.
I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.
I find that when I come upon something that I think is a historical revelation, I have the sort of adrenaline rush that I imagine a gambler gets in Las Vegas when he hits the jackpot. It's still tremendously exciting to me, and I think all of my peers in the business feel the same way.
I'm disturbed by the words missing from the Trump campaign: Liberty, justice, freedom, and tolerance.
Politics boils down to the stories we tell ourselves. And unfortunately, we tell ourselves different stories.
Hamilton was young, dashing, and romantic. He lent himself perfectly to be the star of a musical.
The thing with all the Founding Fathers, one of the most common words they used was 'posterity.' They were constantly referring to posterity.
There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.
It's a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.
I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.
I think there's a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.
What I find very interesting about the mutual funds managers is that here are people who are the new masters of the universe. They're managing billions, yet they're subject to this quiet daily tyranny of numbers.
I'm dubious about having Social Security put into the stock market. I think that we have gotten very far away from the idea that there's something sacrosanct about retirement investments.
Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
The story of Alexander Hamilton lends itself to hip-hop treatment. Hamilton's personality is driven and unrelenting, and the music has that same quality. The music and the man mirror each other.
When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.
I'm sure there are many more people who can identify with failure and hardship in life than with the success of an Alexander Hamilton or a John D. Rockefeller.
Ultimately, the appraisal of Grant's presidency rests upon posterity's view of Reconstruction.
Strange as it may seem, George Washington's life has now been so minutely documented that we know far more about him than did his own friends, family, and contemporaries.
Hamilton had a certain social versatility, and in a way, that is understandable because he's someone who rises up from the lowest rungs of society and then scales the top. And he gets to know people from every strata along the way.
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.
I felt blessed by the existence of Horace Porter's 'Campaigning With Grant.'
One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it's the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.
Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.
One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.
A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.
I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.
