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"Winthrop, John (1588-1649)"
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City on a hill : a History of American exceptionalism
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--Book jacket.
Book
In Search of the City on a Hill
In Search of the City on a Hill challenges the widespread assumption that Americans have always used this potent metaphor to define their national identity.It demonstrates that America's 'redeemer myth' owes more to nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinventions of the Puritans than to the colonists' own conceptions of divine election.
eBook
As a city on a hill : the story of America's most famous lay sermon
\"'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 ... celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop's long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In [this book], ... Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea\"--Dust jacket flap.
Book
City on a Hill
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.
eBook
Perfecting friendship : politics and affiliation in early American literature
Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of \"perfect\" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.
eBook
John Winthrop
John Winthrop's effort to create a Puritan \"City on a Hill\" has had a lasting effect on American values, and many remember this phrase famously quoted by the late Ronald Reagan. However, most know very little about the first American to speak these words.Here, Francis J. Bremer draws on over a decade of research to offer a superb biography of Winthrop, who, more than anyone else shaped the culture of early New England. Bremer provides a path-breaking treatment of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's family background, youthful development, and English career. His dissatisfaction with the decline of the \"godly kingdom of the Stour Valley\" in which he had been raised led him on his errand to rebuild such a society in a new England. We see the personal side of Winthrop--the doubts and concerns of the spiritual pilgrim and his everyday labors and pleasures. Bremer also sheds much light on important historical moments in England and America, such as the Reformation and the rise of Puritanism, and colonial relations with Native Americans.
eBook
AUTHOR, AUTHOR
When the great nineteenth-century antiquarian James Savage disputed the assumption that John Winthrop wrote A Short Story (London 1644), he was on to something, although the evidence he adduced was incorrect. Taking as a starting point two facts about the book-it is a compilation of documents and bears numerous marks of being an intentional text-this essay describes how the Short Story came into being and suggests who may be the \"I\" who mysteriously (and unidentified) speaks in the text.
Journal Article
\Barren, Silent, Godless\: Void and Wilderness in Cormac McCarthy's The Road 1
This paper proposes to explore how, through apocalyptic destruction, a characteristically American landscape in Cormac McCarthy's The Road has undergone the process of removal of identity, and has, therefore, reverted into the hostile wilderness that marked Early American experience in its attribution of meaning to space. Considering Leo Marx's \"The idea of nature in America,\" the journey delineated by both protagonists can be located as the heir to a Puritan tradition and/of American Nature. Yet, in the diegetic postapocalyptic landscape, human senses grow dim and biblical Words grow unspoken, as the potential for civilization turns into silence and a return to dust - and, most importantly, ash. If a characteristically American identity has been obliterated, how can meaning, if any, be found in the same material space it once held? Where can references to the past reside? Ultimately, if a dystopian destruction of both identity and the material plane has subverted American utopian anxiety, in what ways has the possibility of considering American mobility through space in search for meaning turned void? McCarthy's novel appears to provide no answer. However, as Toni Morrison stated - in \"Unspeakable Things Unspoken,\" - \"a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum.\"
Journal Article