From a Bancroft Prize–winning historian, the fascinating story of how an obscure Puritan sermon was remade into a founding document of American identity “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, Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea, revealing how nationalism encourages the invention of “timeless” texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.

In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Celia Applegate, Peter Brown, Harold Cook, April Masten, Mae Ngai, Jocelyn Olcott, Mimi Sheller, Pamela Smith, and Nira Wickramasinghe.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel T. Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.

"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed--so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism--and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945. On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact. The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long duree of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.

As the 2020s began, protestors filled the streets, politicians clashed over how to respond to a global pandemic, and new scrutiny was placed on what rights US citizens should be afforded. Newly revised and expanded to address immigration, gay rights, privacy rights, affirmative action, and more, The Bill of Rights in Modern America provides clear insights into the issues currently shaping the United States. Essays explore the law and history behind contentious debates over such topics as gun rights, limits on the powers of law enforcement, the death penalty, abortion, and states' rights. Accessible and easy to read, the discerning research offered in The Bill of Rights in Modern America will help inform critical discussions for years to come.

As the 2020s began, protestors filled the streets, politicians clashed over how to respond to a global pandemic, and new scrutiny was placed on what rights US citizens should be afforded. Newly revised and expanded to address immigration, gay rights, privacy rights, affirmative action, and more, The Bill of Rights in Modern America provides clear insights into the issues currently shaping the United States. Essays explore the law and history behind contentious debates over such topics as gun rights, limits on the powers of law enforcement, the death penalty, abortion, and states' rights. Accessible and easy to read, the discerning research offered in The Bill of Rights in Modern America will help inform critical discussions for years to come.

Contention, argument, and power have always been the tradition in American political talk. Any country that began in a revolution was bound to have this history. But the language of argument uses particular words with particular, sometimes shifting, meanings and to know what they are and what they meant over time is a critical contribution to political history. It is true that politicians may act as though they are part of no particular ideological tradition, but history shows that, more often than not, they use an understood meaning to enhance their actions. As Daniel Rodgers shows in this book, rhetoric has consequences.