City On The Hill

Download or read book City on a Hill written by Abram C. Van Engen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book City on a Hill written by Alex Krieger and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book As a City on a Hill written by Daniel T. Rodgers and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book City on the Hill written by Mark Hall and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2014 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: City on the Hill helps kids learn and celebrate their role in the diversity of the body of Christ. Based on the hit song by the same title from Casting Crowns.

Download or read book City On A Hill written by James Traub and published by Addison Wesley Publishing Company. This book was released on 1994-10-20 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traub relates the daily struggles of men and women trying to gain an education against the odds at the City College of New York, telling the story of the college's difficult present against the backdrop of its 150-year history. Students battle the cultural and economic forces that perpetuate inner-city poverty while the college that produced eight Nobel Laureates now tries to prepare survivors of the public school system for college-level work. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book City on a Hill written by Philip Graham Ryken and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2003-03-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are now living in post-Christian times, when Christianity no longer is the prevailing influence on the mind and heart of our culture. But we cannot compromise. More than ever before, it is imperative that Christians understand and embrace the biblical pattern for the church. Philip Graham Ryken knows that the changing face of America makes the need for the church to remain steadfast even more important. City on a Hill will provide readers with a deeper understanding of how to live for Christ in the twenty-first century: go back to the model set out in the first century. Sure to be an encouragement and challenge to anyone concerned about the effectiveness of the church today.

Download or read book In Search of the City on a Hill written by Richard M. Gamble and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.