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This book analyzes the common narrative residing in American History textbooks published in the first half of the 19th century. That story, what the author identifies as the American “creation” or “origins” narrative, is simultaneously examined as both historic and “mythic” in composition. It offers a fresh, multidisciplinary perspective on an enduring aspect of these works. The book begins with a provocative thesis that proposes the importance of the relationship between myth and history in the creation of America’s textbook narrative. It ends with a passionate call for a truly inclusive story of who Americans are and what Americans aspire to become. The book is organized into three related sections. The first section provides the context for the emergence of American History textbooks. It analyzes the structure and utility of these school histories within the context of antebellum American society and educational practices. The second section is the heart of the book. It recounts and scrutinizes the textbook narrative as it tells the story of America’s emergence from “prehistory” through the American Revolution—the origins story of America. This section identifies the recurring themes and images that together constitute what early educators conceived as a unified cultural narrative. Section three examines the sectional bifurcation and eventual re-unification of the American History textbook narrative from the 1850s into the early 20th century. The book concludes by revisiting the relationship between textbooks, the American story, and mythic narratives in light of current debates and controversies over textbooks, American history curriculum and a common American narrative.
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.