Richard M Gamble: 3 books

*“They died to save their country and they only saved the world.” * This line, the final one in G. K. Chesterton’s poem “The English Graves,” serves for Richard M. Gamble as an interpretive key to a peculiarly important moment in American history: the time of the First World War,...

Since its composition in Washington's Willard Hotel in 1861, Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been used to make America and its wars sacred. Few Americans reflect on its violent and redemptive imagery, drawn freely from prophetic passages of the Old and New Testaments, and fewer...

In Search of the City on a Hill challenges the widespread assumption that Americans have always used this potent metaphor to define their national identity. It demonstrates that America's 'redeemer myth' owes more to nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinventions of the Puritans than to the colonists'...