Wright Thompson

And it feels like a lot of the sort of anti-government stuff is in the knowledge that without the federal government, there wouldn't be a state of Mississippi because the state existed for a commodity that no longer really exists like it did.

I mean, so I grew up there and I didn't realize the degree to which, you know, cotton was oil until 1933 when DuPont invented nylon and Mississippi was Saudi Arabia.

The most irrationally arrogant people in the world are the people in charge of the bottom rung on a commodity chain because they think they have power, but they have none.

If you grew up in the Mississippi Delta, it's like you grew up around a failed experiment and you can't quite figure out what happened here.

The degree to which Emmett Till was murdered for his optimism and for...

trying to test boundaries in a place that felt more and more closed in on itself.

I mean, those things aren't unrelated.

And so like the heartbreaking thing about the history of the book, because you're right, it does start off and you think, is this going to be like an academic exercise?

And what it ends up being is a history of the United States of America told in 36 square miles.

And the number of times in which one decision going the other way could have averted everything that happened in the state of Mississippi is incredible.

I mean, I love to talk about

was that the panic of 1837, all the southern states defaulted on all of their bonds and all of their loans from the international capital market.

And all the other states paid their money back, but Mississippi didn't.

And if you go read all the reasons, they invented culture war reasons for just not wanting to pay the money back.

And the problem, of course, is that after the Civil War, when everything is wrecked and people need to go borrow money to rebuild, Alabama has great credit.

So they have a steel industry.

And Mississippi has no credit to the point that in the 1930s, the country of Monaco was still suing the state of Mississippi trying to get its money back from a century earlier.

And so the degree to which Mississippians today are prisoners of political decisions and policy decisions that were made 100 years before their parents were born.

One of the reasons the water doesn't work in Jackson, Mississippi, is that Mississippi didn't pay its bills in 1837.

I mean, it's as embarrassing as that is to say.