"'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...

"In early 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company received a royal charter that allowed the Company to carry on the work, begun earlier in the decade by the Dorchester Company and then the New England Company, of developing permanent settlements in New England. During 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company sent settlers to Massachusetts Bay, mostly young, single men, servants either of the Company itself or of particular merchants and gentlemen associated...