“... presented itself to him as an opportunity for experiment. While thousands were weeping at George Whitefield’s outdoor meeting in Philadelphia, Franklin, instead of getting closer to hear the preacher better, walked away to reach the limit of Whitefield’s voice and so calculate the maximum number of people who could fit within the area – and ...”

“... the Myth of the Founding, which, as an aspiration if not in practice, took as its basic premise Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, ‘All men are created equal’? Eventually, Slotkin argues, leaders of the slave South concluded that Jefferson had simply been wrong, a conviction made plain by ...”

“... Hone’s 1821 broadside The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong! Dedicated to the Holy Alliance, George Cruikshank depicted the alliance as a kind of steampunk Terminator, crushing skulls under its iron feet, its faceless head wreathed with daggers, its arms (made of chains) brandishing flame and sword. The print was prompted by the first of many notorious ...”

“... if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers over the entire tradition of American ‘Babbittry’. Some subterranean but essential link runs from Poor Richard to Disneyland, Mozart on the muzak ...”

“... survived the death of Puritanism. Carrying along nationalist historians like the Jacksonian George Bancroft, American Renaissance writers such as Hawthorne and Melville, and political leaders like Lincoln, the sacralisation of the United States created ‘the single most cohesive culture in the modern world’. Americans share not a common middle-class ...”

“... Some hoped to become solvent by moving to fresh lands in the Piedmont. Others, like George Washington, switched from tobacco to wheat, thereby transforming themselves from ‘planters’ to ‘farmers’. ‘New crops generated new symbols,’ as Breen observes, and although wheat, Virginia’s second staple by the 1770s, did not displace ...”

“... one to come. Parkman’s two volumes will appear in the autumn, along with the collected works of Jefferson in one volume, one of four Henry Adams volumes, and one of four Emersons. James will fill eight volumes, and the first, soon to appear, includes Watch and Ward and four other early works. His critical writing will occupy two volumes, which will be not ...”

“... kingdom above the level of the earthworm had yet to reach this remote spot. The entomologist George McGavin’s eyes still light up when he describes the strange insects he recognised there as species distinct from all those previously known to science. As well as esoteric specialities, there were huge beetles and an ant that had evolved to resemble a ...”

“... has seemed distasteful, a relic of a less enlightened era of international relations. America, George W. Bush insisted during the 2000 election campaign, had ‘never been an empire’ and had no intention of becoming one. Politicians still shy away from the term. But since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the term ‘empire’ has been used without ...”

“... we might have some conception of the amount of genius that slavery is murdering’. But Thomas Jefferson compared her to a parrot and thought her poems ‘below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of The Dunciad are to her as Hercules to the author of that poem.’ In a context where figures including Kant and Hume used aesthetics to confirm racist claims ...”

“... of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has condemned the plan because, among other things, George Washington is mentioned less frequently than Harriet Tubman, who led groups of slaves to freedom before the Civil War. Ms Cheney seems not to appreciate the difference between a set of curricular guidelines and a textbook. Topics mandated under the new ...”

“... him of forging a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s ...”

“... needs to be taught or instilled. Thus, even if originally it symbolised the virtue and valour of George Washington and the scenes of sacrifice associated with the ‘spirit of ’76’, patriotism came to be generated by appeals to masculinity, chauvinism, racism, religion, xenophobia, monument-worship, or, more positively, a group moral covenant and ...”

“... George Saunders​ has long had a thing for ghosts, especially ghosts who haven’t figured out that they’re dead. The title story of his first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), concerned a down-on-its-luck theme park with a Blacksmith Shoppe, a ninety-foot section of the Erie Canal, and a holographic projection of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States ...”

“... mass communications remade the office of the presidency. Beginning with the inauguration of George Washington in 1789, Americans had expressed ambivalence about the power of their single, elected leader. As citizens of a republic born out of revolt against a monarchy, they repudiated the trappings of kings and queens, but never wholly the sense that a ...”