City on a Hill

City on a Hill PDF Author: Abram C. Van Engen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fresh, original history of America’s national narratives, told through the loss, recovery, and rise of one influential Puritan sermon from 1630 to the present day In this illuminating book, Abram Van Engen shows how the phrase “City on a Hill,” from a 1630 sermon by Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, shaped the story of American exceptionalism in the twentieth century. By tracing the history of Winthrop’s speech, its changing status throughout time, and its use in modern politics, Van Engen asks us to reevaluate our national narratives. He tells the story of curators, librarians, collectors, archivists, antiquarians, and often anonymous figures who emphasized the role of the Pilgrims and Puritans in American history, paving the way for the saving and sanctifying of a single sermon. This sermon’s rags-to-riches rise reveals the way national stories take shape and shows us how those tales continue to influence competing visions of the country—the many different meanings of America that emerge from its literary past.

City on a Hill

City on a Hill PDF Author: Abram C. Van Engen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fresh, original history of America’s national narratives, told through the loss, recovery, and rise of one influential Puritan sermon from 1630 to the present day In this illuminating book, Abram Van Engen shows how the phrase “City on a Hill,” from a 1630 sermon by Massachusetts Bay governor John Winthrop, shaped the story of American exceptionalism in the twentieth century. By tracing the history of Winthrop’s speech, its changing status throughout time, and its use in modern politics, Van Engen asks us to reevaluate our national narratives. He tells the story of curators, librarians, collectors, archivists, antiquarians, and often anonymous figures who emphasized the role of the Pilgrims and Puritans in American history, paving the way for the saving and sanctifying of a single sermon. This sermon’s rags-to-riches rise reveals the way national stories take shape and shows us how those tales continue to influence competing visions of the country—the many different meanings of America that emerge from its literary past.

As a City on a Hill

As a City on a Hill PDF Author: Daniel T. Rodgers
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

City on a Hill

City on a Hill PDF Author: Alex Krieger
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674987993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book Here

Book Description
A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American story from the Pilgrims to the “smart city,” Krieger delivers a striking new history of our built environment. The Puritans were the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban dreaming and urban renewal—one generation’s utopia forming the next one’s nightmare—and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney’s EPCOT, hippie communes, and Las Vegas. Krieger’s compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by.

City Upon a Hill

City Upon a Hill PDF Author: Frank W. Fox
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611650297
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


A City Upon a Hill

A City Upon a Hill PDF Author: Larry Witham
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006198311X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Witham’s highly readable history of the American sermon strongly bolsters the contention that words change minds and alter the course of events.” —Booklist Pivotal moments in U.S. history are indelibly marked by the sermons of the nation’s greatest orators. From colonial times to the present, the sermon has motivated Americans to fight wars as well as fight for peace. Sermons have provoked the mob mentality of witch hunts and blacklists, but they have also stirred activists in the women’s and civil rights movements. A City Upon a Hill tells the story of these powerful words and how they shaped the destiny of a nation. A City Upon a Hill includes the story of Robert Hunt, the first preacher to brave the dangerous sea voyage to Jamestown; Jonathan Mayhew’s “most seditious sermon ever delivered,” which incited Boston’s Stamp Act riots in 1765; early calls for abolition and “Preacher-Captain” Nat Turner’s bloody slave revolt of 1831; Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon at Fort Sumter on the day of Lincoln’s assassination; tent revivalist/prohibitionist Billy Sunday’s “booze sermon”; the challenging words of Martin Luther King Jr., which inspired the civil rights movement; Billy Graham’s moving speeches as “America’s pastor” and spiritual advisor to multiple U.S. presidents; and Jerry Falwell’s legacy of changing the way America does politics. A City Upon a Hill provides a history of the United States as seen through the lens of the preached words—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—that inspired independence, constitutional amendments, and military victories, and also stirred our worst prejudices, selfish materialism, and stubborn divisiveness—all in the name of God.

A Model of Christian Charity

A Model of Christian Charity PDF Author: John Winthrop
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781646792627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Get Book Here

Book Description


John Winthrop

John Winthrop PDF Author: Michael Parker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136725946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book Here

Book Description
Puritan politician, lawyer, and lay theologian John Winthrop fled England in 1630 when it looked like Charles I had successfully blocked all hopes of passing Puritan-inspired reforms in Parliament. Leading a migration, he came to New England in the hopes of creating an ideal Puritan community and eventually became the governor of Massachusetts. Winthrop is remembered for his role in the Puritan migration to the colonies and for delivering what is probably the most famous lay sermon in American history, "A Model of Christian Charity." In it he proclaimed that New England would be "a city upon a hill"--an example for future colonies. In John Winthrop: Founding the City upon a Hill, Michael Parker examines the political and religious history of this iconic figure. In this short biography, bolstered by letters, sermons, and maps, John Winthrop introduces students to the colonial world, the Pequot Wars, and the history of American Exceptionalism.

Planning the City Upon a Hill

Planning the City Upon a Hill PDF Author: Lawrence W. Kennedy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
An account of Boston's planning history. Nine chapters detail the key developments that shaped each period of Boston's growth, focusing on the post-World War II era. The text describes the process and significance of all the major projects - from the first wharves to the latest skyscrapers.

In Search of the City on a Hill

In Search of the City on a Hill PDF Author: Richard M. Gamble
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441162321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American history of the 'city on a hill' metaphor from its Puritan beginnings to its role in Reagan's American civil religion and beyond.

City on a Hilltop

City on a Hilltop PDF Author: Sara Yael Hirschhorn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979176
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since 1967, more than 60,000 Jewish-Americans have settled in the territories captured by the State of Israel during the Six Day War. Comprising 15 percent of the settler population today, these immigrants have established major communities, transformed domestic politics and international relations, and committed shocking acts of terrorism. They demand attention in both Israel and the United States, but little is known about who they are and why they chose to leave America to live at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this deeply researched, engaging work, Sara Yael Hirschhorn unsettles stereotypes, showing that the 1960s generation who moved to the occupied territories were not messianic zealots or right-wing extremists but idealists engaged in liberal causes. They did not abandon their progressive heritage when they crossed the Green Line. Rather, they saw a historic opportunity to create new communities to serve as a beacon—a “city on a hilltop”—to Jews across the globe. This pioneering vision was realized in their ventures at Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Later, the movement mobilized the rhetoric of civil rights to rebrand itself, especially in the wake of the 1994 Hebron massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein, one of their own. On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, Hirschhorn illuminates the changing face of the settlements and the clash between liberal values and political realities at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.