Richard Gamble’s book, In Search of the City on a Hill: the Making and Unmaking of an American Myth, helps make sense of exceptionalism’s evolution. Gamble traces the “city on a hill” metaphor, from Puritan leader John Winthrop, who took it from the gospels, to its reincarnation in the 20th century as an explicitly political idea at the heart of foreign policy debates.

Historians Walter McDougall, the author of Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776, and Derek Leebaert, the author of Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, will provide commentary.