In City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Abram C. After identifying Puritanism as the beginnings of this incipient nation (even though Native Americans were here all along), Miller turned to Winthrop’s sermon and his symbolic phrase to assert both the purpose and distinctiveness of the American experience. One of the earliest documented instances is Harvard scholar Perry Miller’s retrieval of the metaphor in his mid-twentieth century efforts to define and articulate the meaning of America. This metaphorical “city on a hill” has been appealed to repeatedly throughout U.S. Here, the church and civil society in partnership with each other were destined to carry out covenantal responsibilities for living together as one community.
would ultimately become an independent nation, this metaphorical “city on a hill” was a civil religious symbol for the national and religious commitments of a newly developing English colony-a colony that Winthrop hoped would eventually be an exemplar for English colonies throughout North America and elsewhere. This new colony would be a “city upon a hill,” he famously declared in his “A Model of Christian Charity,” where the “eyes of all people are upon us.” His sermon was virtually unknown in his day but would amass popularity as a consequence of the Cold War.
Simply put, it was to represent religious and political freedom. Winthrop proposed that the meaning of this new colony was to establish autonomous and democratic congregations, independent and separate from a centralized English state church. Along with his fellow Puritans, he traveled across the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Arbella in 1630 to a “new” England to flee the religious and political persecution of “old” England. One of the earliest settlers to ponder the meaning of America was the Englishman Sir John Winthrop. Gorman’s poem reminds us why we must continue the vital work needed to reach that sought-after city. Winthrop’s call to early Americans to be “a city upon a hill” is among the first efforts to define America-to summon us to think about who we are and who we want to be. A full appreciation of Gorman’s poem begins with someone not associated with either Black History Month or Women’s History Month-the seventeenth-century founding figure of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman’s “ The Hill We Climb” continues a line of prominent Americans who have called the nation to reflect on the meaning and identity of America. The transition from Black History Month to Women’s History Month is an occasion for commemorating the contributions of Black women to our nation’s history-and to the very idea and identity of America.
Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman speaks at the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021.
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