As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon

New
Illustrated
2018
$28.60

How an obscure Puritan sermon came to be seen as a founding document of American identity and exceptionalism
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England's founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop's long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop's text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since.
As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop's words--from Winthrop's own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln's haunting reference to this almost chosen people, to the city on a hill that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump.
As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop's words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of timeless texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.

Synopsis

How an obscure Puritan sermon came to be seen as a founding document of American identity and exceptionalism

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England's founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop's long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop's text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since.

As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop's words--from Winthrop's own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln's haunting reference to this almost chosen people, to the city on a hill that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump.

As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop's words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of timeless texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 368
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 04 Dec 2018
ISBN 10: 0691181594
ISBN 13: 9780691181592

Media Reviews

Reading As a City on a Hill is an opportunity to be reminded yet again why Daniel Rodgers's work has been so formative for generations of American historians. In captivating prose, he demonstrates beautifully how every present is layered with its past, even in ways hidden to its actors. --Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, author of American Nietzsche
A gem of a book. Daniel Rodgers's inquiry into John Winthrop's much-quoted essay challenges a raft of assumptions and brims with insight and provocation. Rodgers has always written intellectual history at its very best: learned, searching, and vital. --Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
In lucid and engaging prose, Daniel Rodgers awakens us to the presence of a historical myth--and to the particular importance of history in the creation of American nationalism and national identity. This is a book based on feats of archival research but above all on an acute ear for language and the multiple valences that, over time, particular words acquire. --David D. Hall, author of A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England
Today, most of us understand John Winthrop's famous phrase, 'a city upon a hill, ' to mean that America is the exceptional nation and model for all mankind. But in this brilliant and engaging book, distinguished historian Daniel Rogers shows how the phrase meant almost the opposite--and how it has been used and misused throughout American history. --Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
In As a City on a Hill, Daniel Rodgers offers a brilliant and much-needed revision to the legend that has been built around John Winthrop's famous sermon. This sharply written and compellingly argued book shows how Winthrop's words, often misread as a precursor to American nationalism, were in fact a call to our responsibilities to build community and nurture mutuality. --E. J. Dionne, coauthor of One Nation after Trump and author of Our Divided Political Heart
A fine book, As a City on a Hill shows how the multiple meanings of John Winthrop's sermon unfolded, with unexpected developments at every turn, over almost four centuries. --James T. Kloppenberg, the author of Toward Democracy