Reviews in American History

Last winter, shortly before my university sent everyone home to wait out the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, an undergraduate from China came to my office hours. She had never taken a course with me nor was she even a history major, but she had a pressing question: "What," she asked me, "does America mean?" I was flummoxed. I have spent most of my professional career exploring the way that different groups of Americans answered that question: Progressive-Era reformers who sought to turn Indigenous people into "citizen Indians"; corporate executives and interfaith activists who in the mid-20th century contested the meaning of the "American Way"; proponents and opponents of immigration reform; and scholars of civil religion in the mid-1960s and beyond. Never, however, had I been asked the question so directly myself. I said something about the ideas contained in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, about ongoing debates over "democracy" and "freedom," and about the yawning gap between America's stated ideals and lived reality. I may have alluded to the huge pro-democracy protests then spilling through the streets of Hong Kong. The young woman listened politely, but was clearly dissatisfied. She had expected a crisper definition. Finally, late for class, I sent her away. The next week she was back. "What," she asked me, "is the American dream?"

I thought about this encounter as I sat down to review Daniel Rodgers's As a City on a Hill and Sarah Churchwell's Behold, America. Rodgers challenges much of what we thought we knew about John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," then traces the process by which this treatise emerged from nearly 300 years in obscurity to be hailed as one of the nation's "foundational texts" (p. 216). Churchwell excavates what she calls the "entangled" and "misunderstood" [End Page 477] history of two phrases that collided during the candidacy of Donald Trump: "America First" and "the American Dream." Both books tell complex stories about American nationalism, invented traditions, and what Rodgers has elsewhere called "contested truths."¹ Neither would give my mysterious visitor much comfort.

Rodgers's book is part scholarly detective work and part meditation on nationalism. He first reconstructs the meaning of Winthrop's text in its time, then shows how some of its key ideas and phrases circulated widely throughout the Atlantic world during a period in which the document itself was largely forgotten. Finally, he tracks the text's rediscovery and reinvention over the course of the 20th century. According to Rodgers, the "shining city on a hill" ultimately popularized by President Ronald Reagan bore little resemblance to the exposed and anxious city of which Winthrop wrote.

Rodgers begins his book with an image now familiar to most educated Americans. It is 1630 and John Winthrop, the elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, stands on the deck of his flagship Arbella and delivers a powerful "lay sermon" outlining the reasons that he and his fellow voyagers have left their homes and undertaken a dangerous ocean crossing to start a new life in North America. He reminds the Puritans that they are a covenanted people on a godly errand. They face great risks, but if they succeed, the eyes of the world will be upon them. They will be made "a praise and a glory." They will be "as a city upon a hill." This scene, celebrated in history books and told as a parable by pundits and politicians, is often hailed as the nation's origin story. Both boosters and critics cite Winthrop's text as the source of America's confidence, sense of mission, and embrace of exceptionalism. "It is an uplifting story and a haunting one," Rodgers acknowledges. There is just one problem: "[I...