The
City on a Hill Archive
The City on a Hill project tracks every use of the phrase “city on a hill” and its variants from 1600 to the present in order to find out what this phrase means, in what context it most often appears, when it begins referring to America, and what kind of America it identifies. It’s part of the WashU Humanities Digital Workshop, which is a research workshop comprised of Humanities professors applying computational tools and methods to traditional humanities research projects.
Exploring Anthologies of Early American Literature
As a relatively recent field of study, early American literature has seen its canonical outlines increase exponentially in the last several decades. With the publication of the first Norton Anthology of American Literature in 1979, the first attempts were made to define the content of this growing field. As the Norton anthologies continued to expand over the coming years, they found healthy competition from the Heath Anthologies of American Literature, which offered a more expansive interpretation of anthologized content. Both anthologies tell a story—in fact, multiple stories—of the developing field of early American literature, stories which often only come into view once the data has been gathered, sorted, and displayed