For two hundred years, essayists and historians have written about the Puritan influences on American culture. The perspectives in those accounts have varied over time, from initially being exaggerated and hagiographic—not surprising, considering that many early authors hailed from New England—to being more probing, if not critical, of that influence (e.g., Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic). Playing no small part in this exploration has been the related claim about the Puritan origins of American identity (e.g., Sacvan Bercovich, The Puritan Origins of the American Self [Yale University Press, 1975]). Every historian of American cultural, intellectual, and religious history is familiar with this overarching narrative.

Abram Van Engen's fascinating book, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, adds to this body of literature by exploring not only the Puritan origins narrative but more specifically the impact of John Winthrop's 1630 sermon A Model of Christian Charity and its iconic phrase: a “city on a hill.” Despite the book's initial discussion of New England Puritanism and the background of Winthrop's sermon City on a Hill, it is not a religious history but an intellectual history of an idea—or better, of a phrase that came to epitomize that idea. It is a story—essentially a detective story—of how an obscure and unexceptional sermon came to be the most famous sermon in American history and to represent modern American exceptionalism. One of the best parts of the book is the way Van Engen shows how the sermon and phrase were interpreted, reinterpreted, and then misinterpreted by antiquarians, historians, and then politicians to meet their own purposes, with the phrase growing in stature along the way.

City on a Hill is essentially three books, or a book with three distinct but related parts. As noted, the first three chapters discuss the context for Winthrop's sermon within Puritan New England and the initial purpose and understanding of the sermon. The next section, still part of the first story, discusses in meticulous detail the provenance of Winthrop's manuscript and the efforts of early antiquarians to recover it and other documents of early colonial America, chiefly of colonial New England. The second book/part is about the rise of the Puritan origins narrative that occurred in the early nineteenth century and was integrated into early histories of America and, more influentially, into early school textbooks (again, chiefly by authors from New England). Here is where the myth of the unique, and idealized, struggle of the Puritans and Pilgrims arose to represent America's ideological founding, one that so impressed de Tocqueville. Coinciding with this New England-origins narrative was the publication of Winthrop's sermon in 1838, accompanied by a fawning introduction by James Savage that placed it and the phrase as a centerpiece of America's origins. Yet, while the stage was set for the sermon to take off, it was overshadowed by the more concise, and digestible, publication of the Mayflower Compact. The sermon still lacked its place in the pantheon of images that represented America.

The final book/part concerns the “rediscovery” of the sermon by historians Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovich, both of whom imposed an interpretation on the phrase that Winthrop likely never intended, one filled with aspects of “chosenness” and American exceptionalism. As Van Engen writes, Bercovich “took a few phrases . . . and amplified them into a unifying vision of American exceptional, further proclaiming that such a vision affected all of American culture.” Today's understanding of Winthrop's meaning “turns out to be Bercovitch's innovation. Puritan origins did not invent the myth of America. Americans, much later, invented the myth of Puritan origins” (267). From there, the narrative of the Puritan origins, and the Miller-Bercovitch interpretation of the sermon, became canonical, influencing historians and politicians alike. Presidents since Kennedy on have employed the phrase to represent America's exportable greatness, particularly Ronald Reagan.

Along the way, Van Engen stops to tell the story of the actors who shaped the understanding of the phrase—John Winthrop, James Savage, and Perry Miller, among others—personalizing the account and adding color to the sermon's long journey from obscurity to fame. This is a clever and effective technique as Van Engen uses it to discuss in detail the provenance of the sermon. The book demonstrates an impressive command of facts, as Van Engen seems to cover every twist and turn in how the sermon came to represent an idea of American exceptionalism.

Readers, however, should not be misled by the book's subtitle: “A History of American Exceptionalism.” City on a Hill is not a comprehensive history of American exceptionalism (the emphasis is on “a” history, not “the” history). While the book discusses earlier episodes of exceptionalism—Manifest Destiny and Cold War exceptionalism—it is chiefly about how the image of a City on a Hill came to epitomize American exceptionalism of the latter twentieth century. As Van Engen shows, it was President Reagan in the 1980s who captured the image and phrase to represent America's exportable greatness. In the conclusion, Van Engen wistfully mourns the decline of the Reaganesque form of exceptionalism, one that was replaced by a Trumpesque version of “America First.” Whether one shares that sentiment, City on a Hill is a masterful account of the resiliency of the Puritan origins narrative and the central place Winthrop's sermon has come to occupy in the story of America's origins and core values.