City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. By Abram C. Van Engen (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2020) 392 pp. $30.00

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On the second day of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in January 2020, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff invoked President Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” He rebuked Trump for conduct in office that threatened America’s historic role as a model of democracy to the world. “America is not just a country,” he warned, “but also an idea.” Schiff’s deployment of the words that Reagan borrowed from Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop show the surprising resilience of a metaphor that no Puritan 400 years ago could have imagined would be used to project American exceptionalism. Trump himself never used it to define “America First.”Van Engen’s work joins a body of scholarship that has reconstructed the strange journey of the “city on a hill” from an obscure lay sermon to a mainstay of modern presidential rhetoric. Van Engen builds on Gamble’s In Search of the City on a Hill (New York, 2012) and Daniel T. Rodgers’s As a City on a Hill (Princeton, 2018). In this valuable addition, he proves that still more remains to be said. Van Engen deftly combine the tools of historical and literary analysis to understand Winthrop’s world, and his purposes, and to trace the reception, publication, and remanufacturing of this now-famous speech.There was never anything inevitable about Winthrop’s discourse becoming canonical in American literature surveys, political theory anthologies, and history source books. For more than 200 years, from its creation in 1630 to its first publication in 1838, Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” was unread, unquoted, and virtually unknown. Its survival was ensured by an antiquarian and his eventual bequest of the text to the New York Historical Society. Its status as a founding document was denied to it, Van Engen shows, by the popularity of the Separatist Pilgrims and the use of the Mayflower Compact as the point of origin for America—at least in New England’s way of telling the story of the traits and aspirations that contributed most to the making of America. Historians ignored the text even after it was published. It made its debut in college classrooms thanks to Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson’s The Puritans (New York, 1938), a hugely successful anthology of Puritan writings, and it entered politics only sixty years ago.One of Van Engen’s significant contributions is to highlight the role of early amateur historians and historical societies in New England in promoting the nation’s Puritan origins. They searched for original documents, preserved them, housed them, and published them. Given their agenda, they “erased” the story of Native Americans and blacks as part of nation-building, as we might expect, but they also erased the South. Their denial of any authentic founding role to Jamestown and the Virginia Colony was perpetuated by Alexis de Tocqueville and a host of popular textbook writers in the nineteenth century who were dedicated to a highly providential reading of America’s rise to greatness.Van Engen’s chapters about Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch—who wrote The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1970), as well as other works about Puritan America—skillfully reveal the unintended consequences of making “A Model of Christian Charity” a definitive text. Miller used Winthrop’s vision of communal brotherhood to summon the United States away from smug materialism; Bercovitch used (or misused) it to prove that America had always been driven by Messianic delusions. Reagan embraced the assumption that Winthrop launched America but turned Winthrop’s speech into a blueprint for material prosperity.In the last few pages of his study, Van Engen speculates that Trump’s silence on Winthrop, and his replacement of an idealist American exceptionalism—embraced by both Republicans and Democrats—with the principles of America First may spell the death of the “city on a hill” as a metaphor for the United States. Indeed, Schiff’s use of the phrase seemed to ring hollow—a rhetorical holdover of a bygone era. But as Van Engen rightly notes, the life and death of a metaphor is impossible to predict. What has been made can be remade and unmade again and again.