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181 Notes no t e s t o t h e i n t roduc t ion 1. John Adams to Benjamin Rush, November 11, 1807, in The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813, ed. John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 106–7. Correspondence from this volume hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by date and page number. 2. See also the later letter of April 22, 1812, citing Timothy Pickering’s opinions on Washington. The same “Colonel Pickering who is now holding himself up as the Friend and Admirer and Lover of Washington” had earlier called Washington an illiterate clown who never wrote his own letters or read more than one book on military strategy (232–33). 3. The term appears to have entered recent discourse via a Newsweek article by Evan Thomas, “Founders Chic: Live from Philadelphia” (July 9, 2001, 48), and H. W. Brands’s Atlantic Magazine essay “Founders Chic” (September 2003, 101–10), with notable reiterations in David Waldstreicher’s review essay “Founders Chic as Culture War” (Radical History Review 84 [Fall 2002]: 185–94) and Francis D. Cogliano’s review essay “Founders Chic” (History 90.299 [July 2005]: 411–19). 4. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 156–59; and Barthes, “Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today,” in Image-MusicText , ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, 165–69 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). 5. We here draw on Roland Barthes’s sense of the semic, referring to the smallest connotative elements—semes—from which symbolic meaning is constructed. For Barthes they are unstable, dispersed “motes of dust, flickers of meaning.” Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 19. 6. One can see this in action in Robert Wuhl’s popular HBO specials, Assume the Position , which feature the comedian in front of an NYU classroom. 7. We note here the obvious irony of John Adams schooling Benjamin Rush, analyst of manias, maniculas, and manalgias, on the Founders pathology. 8. Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 1; Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 7. 9. Molly Anne Rothenberg, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden , MA: Polity, 2010), 9. 10. Ibid. 11. Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6.2 (Spring–Summer 1993): 78. 182 Notes 12. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 3. 13. Garry Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin , 2003), 13. 14. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 35. 15. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 70. 16. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 17. See, for example, Laura Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Black Gothic: The Shadowy Origins of the American Bourgeoisie,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George, 243–69 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 18. Mason, Slavery and Politics, 41. 19. “To examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered these notions.” Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 11. 20. Laurence Hutton, Talks in a Library with Laurence Hutton, Recorded by Isabel Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), 168. 21. Laurence Hutton, Portraits in Plaster (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 246. 22. Orson Squire Fowler, Sexual Science; Including Manhood, Womanhood, and Their Mutual Interrelations . . . as Taught by Phrenology (Philadelphia: National Publishing, 1870), 69–70. 23. Hutton, Talks in a Library, 169. 24. Ibid., 266. no t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 1. Quoted in Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 22. 2. We cite here the 1793 Philadelphia edition: Richard Snowden, The American Revolution : Written in the Style of Ancient History, 2 vols...

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