Sarah Vowell
speaker
165 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 28 Jun
Sarah Vowell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I cannot overemphasize how much I love that story.
Not just the metaphor of it, that it is the best ideal of America I can think of, the picture of liquored-up ladies and dancing Indians, the strangeness of reenacting the Fort Dearborn massacre to scare the queasy Easterners, turning what must have still been an open wound into a practical joke.
I love that story as proof of the theorem that then, as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.
The ladies of Chicago wouldn't be dancing with Indians much longer, because there wouldn't be any Indians left to dance with.
The city of Chicago was officially incorporated in 1833, the year the Pottawatomie chiefs stood near the old DuSable home and signed away their land in Illinois to the administration of Andrew Jackson, who found time in his busy schedule of relocating the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw to have the Pottawatomie removed west to what U.S.
government surveyors had called land too poor for snakes to live upon.
Three years after the Pottawatomie signed away their land and the city was incorporated, construction began on that canal that Joliet had envisioned to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi.
The canal worked pretty much exactly as Joliet had imagined.
So much trade moved past this corner that Chicago expanded from a muddy little hamlet of a few hundred people to a city of over 100,000 in just 25 years.
Cyrus McCormick built his McCormick Reaper Works right here on the river in 1847.
His machine, the Reaper, turned out to be one of the most significant inventions in the history of history.
Before McCormick, it took three hours to gather a bushel of wheat, and with the Reaper, it took ten minutes.
Because McCormick helped mechanize agriculture, farms could take up more space and use less labor in less time.
By speeding up and emptying out the country, McCormick populated the city.
Not that the March of Progress is necessarily benign, especially if you're one of those urban workers.
Just ask the dead of the Haymarket Riot who laid down their lives just 15 blocks from here for the eight-hour workday, or read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle about what the Stockyard employees went through on the South Side.
By the Civil War, most of America's grain from the west and the vast prairie around Chicago was unloaded from trains here, traded on the commodities exchange, and then sent east on ships from Lake Michigan, all within a five-minute walk of the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive.
could have been this very spot the poet carl sandberg was thinking of in his famous poem about chicago hog butcher to the world he called the city tool maker stacker of wheat player with railroads and the nation's freight handler stormy husky brawling city of the big shoulders okay so over here tool maker
That was the Reaper factory on the north side of the river.
And over there, a stacker of wheat on the south side.
Showing 61–80 of 165 · page 4 of 9
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