Abram C. Van Engen > Quotes

“In actuality, New Englanders carried enslaved Africans over not long after they were brought to Virginia, and Native Americans were sold and enslaved by Puritans for many years.”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism

“We see that in the work of Belknap, for the more he celebrated the history of America as the rise of liberty, the less tolerance he had for Indians. They became problems, not participants, in the grand American drama.”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism

“in the blood of the Teutonic peoples—those Germanic tribes that defeated the Romans and created the Anglo-Saxons, who in turn produced the Puritans, who finally carried a pure form of Christianity along with civil and religious liberty to America.”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism

“Bercovitch’s works explained Reagan’s language through Winthrop’s sermon at the same time that Reagan used Winthrop’s language to explain the nature and identity of the entire United States.”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism

“So indispensable did this sermon become to Perry Miller that he actually began inventing facts to support its significance.”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism

“For American history to cohere—for Belknap’s narrative of America to work—Native Americans had to be removed.”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism

“he felt compelled to denigrate and eliminate Native Americans. Only in that way could his story of America be saved.7”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism

“For Donald Trump, there has always been only the present day, only sovereignty and self-interest now. It is as though he has attempted to freeze time, to keep people in place, to remove from memory any history of passage, settlement, migration, or colonization.”
― Abram C. Van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism