Sarah Vowell
Hipster historian Sarah Vowell spins her admittedly quirky personal obsessions into bestselling popular history books like 2006’s Assassination Vacation and her newest work, The Wordy Shipmates.
In her personal and historical essays, Vowell occasionally notes her Oklahoma roots and Cherokee heritage. Born in Muskogee, Vowell began working in radio while at college in Montana, and her distinctive voice first gained national attention on the beloved public radio show This American Life. Movie fans will also recognize her endearingly pinched, humorously intellectual tones from her role voicing the character of Violet in The Incredibles.
Vowell’s books are entertaining side trips into weird Americana, obscure historical tales, and the author’s own unapologetically nerdy social commentaries. In 2002’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Vowell traveled across the United States to apply her skeptical, questioning brand of patriotism to the post-September 11th landscape. In Assassination Vacation, she narrowed her focus to consider the murders of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley in a breezy travelogue occasionally interrupted by serious ruminations on America’s often violent political history.
Vowell is a master at unearthing strange quirks of history, as in Assassination Vacation’s tale of Robert Lincoln, the President’s son who was present at all three Presidential assassinations from 1865 to 1901. Robert Lincoln, described by Vowell as “some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom,” is one of the author’s ideal subjects. His weird cameo appearances in history are reconsidered with her acid wit and genuinely insightful commentary to illustrate larger insights about the oddities of our history.
These same qualities are on display in her newest book, The Wordy Shipmates, which studies the “messy but endearing” quest of the Puritans, led by John Winthrop, to found an ideal “city upon a hill” in 1630s Massachusetts. Vowell finds much to admire in the radical efforts of Winthrop, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson to create a new kind of society apart from England, and she finds the roots of many recognizably modern American characteristics in the backwater colony.
“The Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes . . . a sort of republic–the most severely limited, totalitarian, closed-minded, vindictive, hard-ass republic possible. But the democratic impulse is a mutating virus that adapts and changes, quickens and grows; it is contagious, and the (Massachusetts Bay) Charter is one important sneeze.”
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Jinxy McDeath!