Herein, Daniel T. Rodgers provides a detailed and convincing example of how, over time, historians assign different significance to certain key moments in the American past. His test case is John Winthrop's famous “Model” of Christian charity, a chestnut to all of us who teach early American history and culture. Reading this elegant and accessible book will bring a shudder, for Rodgers will cause many of us blush over how we have either exaggerated or virtually invented parts of the history and meaning of what we consider this foundational text.

In his first section, “Text,” Rodgers examines the history of and context for the “Model.” For one thing, it seems barely to have been known to contemporaries; no one in the seventeenth century mentions it (even as they drew on the common scriptural tropes embodied in it), and it exists only in later manuscript copy that found its way to the New-York Historical Society. Even that text is problematic, though, for at the key point when Winthrop counsels that, if the Puritans had followed God's laws, He would “make other plantations like that of New England,” the scribe wrote originally wrote “Massachusetts,” then covered it with “New England,” perhaps an attempt to make the piece relevant to more than just the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Another interesting point: nowhere before the mid-twentieth century was the writing called a “sermon.” Neither did the first twentieth-century historians to write about it term it a “sermon” but a “homily,” a “treatise,” or a “booklet.” Also, on the pamphlet's cover it is identified simply as “written” on board the ship Arabella, not “preached” or “spoken” there, giving the lie to the myth that Winthrop preached his words in mid-Atlantic (28).

Rodgers explains the social context of Winthrop's ideas expressed and, most importantly, argues that the Puritans did not think that they were “constructing” a city on a hill. Instead, they would “be” as a city on a hill, whether or not they liked it, with the world watching for what they presumed would be the experiment's failure. Moreover, the ideas expressed in the Model were hardly unique. Not only had Winthrop used versions of them at other times, but also many of the ideas were common currency in an early seventeenth-century England where many began to criticize the emergent market economy that was disrupting traditional social hierarchies. For Rodgers, the key to the Model's significance lay in Winthrop's emphasis on the necessity for the love, “charity,” that would mitigate the kind of social disruption the Puritans had left behind.

Rodgers then discusses the Model's emergence, discovered in the archives in 1809 and finally published almost thirty years later in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. But even when it was accessible, nineteenth-century historians such as George Bancroft and John Gorham Palfrey hardly noticed it and never mentioned the famous “city on a hill” passage by which we many were later obsessed. But what some began to emphasize, however, was the notion of Americans as a chosen people, which the Model supported. Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, and even Abraham Lincoln were seduced by this rhetoric, as were African Americans who settled the new nation of Liberia, trying to make it a beacon of freedom for the enslaved.

In a third section, “Icon,” we encounter the text that twentieth-century historians (especially Perry Miller) made. As New England, rather than Virginia, was enshrined as the cradle of the republic, and as Puritanism came under microscopic examination by Miller and his colleagues, Winthrop's text became central to their arguments about the meaning of America. The Allies’ success in World War II augmented this celebration of those who were seen foundational to the country's leadership in a new world order, with democracy at its core. Rodgers continues the story through the debacle of Vietnam, which spawned critics of what some, most powerfully Sacvan Bercovitch, now termed the American ideology, and through Ronald Reagan's presidency, when this wily politician made the “city on a hill” his signature phrase.

This is a learned and satisfying book that makes us reconsider how we have understood and used one of the country's iconic documents. And Rodgers’s arguments thankfully return us to the model itself, with its powerful message of love, a much-necessary for troubled times.