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The assembled for this year’s Wood Visiting Professorship includes more than 100 entries, spanning centuries of moral and civic thought. This shorter list offers a compact, accessible on ramp to the lecture and discussion on September 23^rd. It includes a mix of primary sources behind the phrase “City on a Hill,” Robert C. Wood’s own words, and several contemporary works addressing both the country’s founding and the concept of “civic moral compass.” Please note this is not meant to be a comprehensive list—there are many disciplines and dimensions involved with questions of ethics, values, and morality, especially regarding the “civic” side. We do hope it whets your appetite, though, and inspires further inquiry and reflective practice.

Robert C. Wood, in His Own Words and Remembered

Robert C. Wood, Independence Day Oration, delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, July 4, 1968.
Wood’s own articulation of civic ideals for the city

Richard A. Hogarty and Marcy Murninghan, New England Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 20, No. 2, March 21, 2005.
A concise portrait of Wood’s character and legacy

The Source of “City on a Hill”

John Winthrop, 1630.
A sermon that coined the image at the heart of the civic moral compass theme

Mark Peterson, review of Daniel T. Rodgers, As a City Upon a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon, English Historical Review, vol. 135, issue 575 (August 2020), 1024–1026.
A brief account of how Winthrop’s phrase traveled from Puritan sermon to modern political cliché

The Founding, Reconsidered

Danielle Allen, Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat—and the American Revolution— Transformed Britain (New York: Liveright, June 2026).
A tracing of the Revolution's transatlantic roots offering a reminder about how the founding moral claims of the nation were contested and unsettled from the beginning

Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
A tale of two different but related stories: the original making of the Declaration (along with 90 other declarations throughout the 13 colonies) and its subsequent remaking into what most Americans know, remember, and revere 

The Moral Distance Between Ideal and Practice

Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852.
The classic counter-testimony to founding-era self-congratulation

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries (New York: Penguin Press, May 2026).
A timely reflection on how race complicates our civic self-image

Naming and Repairing the Breach

Daron Acemoglu, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? (New York: Penguin Random House, 2026)
Nobel Laureate analysis of how liberal elites failed to acknowledge heavy social and economic shocks that undermined shared prosperity, and what to do about it

Dana Meadows, “,” (Heartland, VT: Sustainability Institute, 1999)
Landmark framework of 12 "leverage points" within complex systems, ranked in increasing order of effectiveness, showing where and how interventions can drive the most powerful structural change

Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Search for Our Better Angels (New York: Random House, 2019).
An accessible narrative of how the country has recovered its moral footing before

Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
The foundational diagnosis of eroding civic bonds

Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).
A leading philosopher's case for renewing a shared public philosophy of the common good

Yuval Levin, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation, and Could Again (New York: Basic Books, 2024).
A hopeful, constitutionally grounded argument for how shared institutions can still bind us together

Jill Lepore, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2025).
A sweeping history of the Constitution

Jeffrey A. Winters, The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy (New York: Scribner, May 26, 2026).
A chronicle of wealth power pushing the world into "participatory inequality,” and how to address it

Moral Reckoning

Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, The Crooked Places Made Straight: Reflections on the Moral Meaning of America (New York: Penguin Press, June 2026).
A biblically inflected meditation on America's moral meaning, calling for us to reach for the highest and noblest aspects of our national character

Loretta J. Ross, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel (New York: Simon & Schuster, February 2026).
A practical, hopeful guide to civil disagreement