STUDY US HISTORY

“It's much more complicated in practice... It's not as though there's some standard procedure that we're all using to reconcile these things.”

“His interpretation of length contraction and time dilation is that this is the effect of moving through the ether, and you have this pressure. This pressure is warping clocks. It's warping measures of length.”

“This iteration of the Klan was built on a business model of multi-level marketing, where recruiters were paid for every new member they signed up. It was this commercial drive, combined with a sense of fraternal belonging, that allowed it to reach such unprecedented scale across the Midwest and West.”

“He looks to them and he says, 'Do you not think it is a matter for tears that when Alexander was my age, he was the ruler of so many great peoples, and yet I have done nothing worthy of great renown?' It's painful to realize that you haven't been living the life to the full extent of what you should be doing and are capable of doing, and I think that's a really powerful moment.”

“Nietzsche quotes Goethe at the beginning of that book that something like, 'I hate all knowledge that does not quicken and enliven me.' And history can be very quickening and enlivening. He calls it the monumental approach to history where you're looking not so much for precise facts, although the facts matter for the story, you're looking for examples of greatness.”

“The downfall of the Indiana Klan, the most powerful branch in the country, was precipitated by the D.C. Stephenson scandal. When the charismatic leader was convicted of a horrific crime against a young woman, it revealed the vast gap between the Klan's moralistic rhetoric and the reality of its leadership.”

“Women were the backbone of the Klan’s social integration, turning a hate group into a family-oriented social club. Through the WKKK, they organized boycotts of non-Protestant businesses and pushed the organization’s agenda into the school system under the guise of patriotic education.”

“He grows up in this kinda dirty part of town. Caesar would have been like a kid hanging out in the street playing dice with his buddies outside of a bar. The Suburra was a kind of place that you didn't really wanna live if you had a better option, and so he's in contact with the underbelly of Rome and his family has is aligned on the Roman left of politics.”

“The reckonings were both political and personal, as the movement struggled to survive its own internal corruption and the changing social tides of the late 1920s. By the time the Great Depression hit, the organization had largely collapsed, having been hollowed out from within by scandal and greed.”

“The 1924 Democratic Convention in New York, famously known as the 'Klanbake,' was perhaps the most fractured political event in American history. It became a proxy war between the old, rural, Protestant America and the new, urban, Catholic, and immigrant-heavy population, leaving the party in tatters for years to follow.”

“I think of history as a kind of source for finding your true self for, like you're kind of looking for yourself. You're looking for somebody who's trying to do something that is the version of the greatest thing that you could do with your own life. And so it's about, like, finding resonance for achievement, and I think this is what the greats tend to get out of history.”

“On the one hand, there are the optimates, the aristocratic faction who stand for the ancient prerogatives of the senate and the tradition. On the other hand, you have the populists who are about things like land reform and promoting talented outsiders. Caesar has really strong connections there because his aunt is married to one of the greatest populist figureheads in Roman history, Gaius Marius.”

“It certainly doesn't show that ideas about falsification are wrong or falsified, but it does show that the most naive ideas… Things are often much more complicated than you think.”