"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 words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? Telling the surprising story, Daniel Rodgers 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, from Abraham Lincoln's reference to this "almost chosen people" to the "city on a hill" that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia.