As a City on a Hill : The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon / Daniel T. Rodgers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rodgers, Daniel T., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Winthrop, John, 1588-1649. Modell of Christian charity.

Winthrop, John.

Winthrop, John, 1588-1649--Influence.

Winthrop, John, 1588-1649.

Cities and towns--United States--History.

Cities and towns.

City and town life.

Sociology, Urban.

United States--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

United States.

Genre:

History.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (367 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

Hardcover edition.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction. " The Most Famous Lay Sermon in All of American History

Chapter 1. Writing "A Model of Christian Charity"

Chapter 2. " We Shall Be as a City upon a Hill"

Chapter 3. A Chosen People

Chapter 4. New England in a World of Holy Experiments

Chapter 5. Left All Alone in Amer i ca

Chapter 6. Love Is a Bond or Ligament

Chapter 7. Moralizing the Market Economy

Chapter 8. The Poor and the Bound aries of Obligation

Chapter 9. Inventing Foundations

Chapter 10. Mobile Metaphors of Nationalism

Chapter 11. From the Top Mast

Chapter 12. Constructing a City on a Hill in Africa

Chapter 13. The Carnage of God's Chosen Nations

Chapter 14. The Historical Embarrassments of New England

Chapter 15. Puritanism in an Existentialist Key

Chapter 16. Arguing over the Puritans during the Cold War

Chapter 17. Ronald Reagan's Shining City on a Hill

Chapter 18. Puritan Foundations of an "Exceptionalist" Nation

Chapter 19. Ambivalent Evangelicals

Epilogue. Disembarking from the Arbella

Appendix. John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity": A Modern Transcription

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780691184371

0691184372

OCLC:

1112117562