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

Product Description

From a Bancroft Prize–winning historian, the fascinating story of how an obscure Puritan sermon was remade into a founding document of American identity“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, Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea, revealing how nationalism encourages the invention of “timeless” texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.

Review

“World’s 2018 Books of the Year”

Review

“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

“[A] masterful history.”
―Robert Tracy McKenzie, Christianity Today

“Rodgers’ superlative book is an intellectual page-turner.”
―Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune

“Through a winding, enthralling timeline, Rodgers successfully illuminates the strange history of ‘a text that we think we know so well that we barely know it at all.’ ”
―Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Daniel T. Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. His many books include
Age of Fracture, winner of the Bancroft Prize.