![]() In the many years that history textbooks hit the market before Miller’s career, none made the coming of Winthrop’s ship a special beginning to American history, and none called the United States a “city on a hill.” After Miller died, Winthrop’s sermon began spreading across textbooks at every level of schooling, so that by 2010 a new U.S. Photograph by George Rose, Hulton Archive, Getty Images Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. After Miller, Winthrop’s text has been quoted by almost every president to hold office: John F. Hardly anyone knew this sermon existed, and no one described the nation as a “city on a hill.” It wasn’t just Reagan who picked it up, either. Tracing the story of America from John Winthrop forward, Reagan built a powerful articulation of American exceptionalism-the idea, as he explained, “that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” In 2012, American exceptionalism-as summarized by the phrase “city on a hill”-became an official plank in the platform of the Republican party.īefore Miller began his career, no politician had turned to “A Model of Christian Charity” as the origin of America or sought national office by quoting, citing, or invoking it. That 1630 sermon by John Winthrop is now famous mainly for its proclamation that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Beginning in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan placed that line, from that sermon, at the center of his political career. In other words, Miller did not seek an origin of America so much as an expression of origins: “the first articulate body of expression upon which I could get a leverage.” For Miller, the Puritans “spoke as fully as they knew how, and none more magnificently or cogently than John Winthrop in the midst of the passage itself, when he delivered a lay sermon aboard the flagship Arbella and called it ‘A Modell of Christian Charity.’” ![]() Then, too, there was that other English colony farther south, Virginia, founded in 1607, which Miller dismissed for lacking the “coherence with which I could coherently begin.” ![]() Augustine in 1565 and Native Americans had been here all along. After all, other Puritans founded Salem in 1628 the Mayflower Separatists established Plymouth in 1620 the Dutch arrived in Manhattan in 1609 the Spanish set up St. ![]() Or, to be more precise, he turned to the moment marked as an origin in a mostly forgotten text. In deciding that “the uniqueness of the American experience” was fundamentally Puritan, Miller turned to the precise origin of America-the founding of Boston in 1630 with the arrival of John Winthrop on the Arbella. Miller’s most lasting influence, however, came not from his overall study of the Puritans but from his assertions about one particular text. And because he began America with the Puritans-because he did so in such an original way and with such overwhelming force-he left in his wake a long train of scholars who took up the study of early New England with fresh interest, all of them re-envisioning Puritanism for the twentieth century. In graduate school, as Miller once recalled, “it seemed obvious that I had to commence with the Puritan migration.” The short prologue of his most widely read book, Errand into the Wilderness (1956), uses the words “begin,” “beginning,” “began,” “commence,” and “origin” fourteen times in three short pages, and almost all of those words applied directly to the Puritans. That self-understanding, for Perry Miller, started with the Puritans. of such a high order that they not only gave delight to those who appreciated the brilliance of his imaginative and searching intellect, but also contributed to the self-understanding of the whole American Nation.” Devoting himself to what he called “the meaning of America,” he tried to unravel its mystery and understand “America’s unending struggle to make herself intelligible.” After he died, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that “Miller’s historical labors were.
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