"Shining" or "Scarred"?

"For this reason, it is thanks more to Reagan than anyone else—including Winthrop himself—that 'city upon a hill' has come to mean what it does today. And it is thanks to the growing ubiquity of the phrase over the past several decades that even the earliest moments of our prehistory are now remembered as if they were merely scenes from this mythical city's construction. Different as they were in approach and outcome, the various settlements through­ out North America—those of the Spanish in the south and west, and those of the English, Dutch, and French in the north—are often viewed through this single lens, as if the radically divergent forms of Christianity brought across the Atlantic were a unified monolith of faith; as if the lands soon conquered by Europe were not already full of cities upon hills of their own."


Salon runs an excerpt of Peter Manseau's One Nation Under Gods: A New American History.