In Gershman's appointment and in the purposes of the NED and its affiliates, there is a direct line back to the very beginnings of the idea of America. How far back? Even before the beginning. Before a shipload of Puritan dissenters had even reached...

Deval Patrick, the nation's former top civil-rights enforcer and an experienced legal executive at two multinational corporations, is laying the groundwork for a possible campaign for governor, a move that would make him the first major...

The church-state conflict began when Puritans, envisioning a Christian nation, founded what John Winthrop called "a citty upon a hill" in Massachusetts, and Williams rejected that vision for another: freedom. He insisted that the state refrain from...

This recognition, however, has, if anything, obscured Robinson's origins. Her ardor for the Puritan and abolitionist traditions, expressed in her recent novels and essays, may make it seem like she must have been born fully formed from the exhumed...

In some of his later uses, like his 1984 Republican nomination acceptance speech he's referring to his own use of the phrase. That's probably because he was quoting John Winthrop directly, and, as Rachel pointed out on the way to commercial break,...

Gingrich and his wife have been promoting the documentary A City Upon a Hill whose bromidic title is ripped from a 1630 homily by Puritan John Winthrop who envisioned the Massachusetts Bay colony as a city to be "watched by the world." Winthrop derived...