Ron Chernow

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.

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.

Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.

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.

When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.