Despite what Sarah Palin was coached to say on Thursday seems to believe, Ronald Reagan did not come up with the idea of "the shining city on a hill."

Andrew J. Bacevich provides the history behind the phrase:

Basically, our own John Winthrop thundered it as the Puritans prepared to found Boston, and he probably would have sent Palin to the stocks (or worse) for suggesting his phrase meant to suggest "an America that is a beacon of democracy and tolerance and freedom and equal rights." Because Winthrop was a religious absolutist who brooked little dissent and was, in fact, warning his fellow Arbella voyagers in Boston Harbor that unless they held fast and created a theocracy doing as God told them to set an example for all mankind (i.e. a city upon a hill):

[T]he Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

Via Jay Fitzgerald.