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
That was where these giant grain silos stood, where now is standing a giant Hyatt hotel.
The player with railroad and nation's freight handler, that's over there behind the Hyatt where the train tracks were.
And look right there, the guy in the leather jacket.
Big shoulders.
It is my project to tell the whole history of America from this corner, and there's no telling of that history without the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president here in Chicago at the Republican National Convention in 1860, on the very site, by the way, of the old Sauganash Hotel, where the Indians and drunken ladies used to dance.
On the Chicago Tribune, standing on North Michigan Avenue, a stone's throw from the bridge, not only campaigned for Lincoln, its editors talked him into running for president in the first place.
Lincoln was considering going for vice president.
Maybe.
The Trib's great editor, Joseph Medill, helped found the Republican Party to advance the anti-slavery cause.
Medill was such a passionate abolitionist that he wrote in a Tribune editorial in 1856, We are not unfrequently told that we crowd the Tribune with anti-slavery matter to the exclusion of other topics.
We plead guilty.
Medill and Company's access to the president wasn't necessarily always in their favor.
At the height of the Civil War, they went to the White House and pleaded to get out of the president's new request for 6,000 more union draftees from Cook County and Chicago.
This after the area had already given up some 22,000 men.
According to writer Lloyd Wendt, after Medill asked for mercy, Lincoln turned on him with that Lincoln-esque biblical wrath scolding.
It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has.
You called for war until we had it.
You called for emancipation, and I have given it to you.
Whatever you have asked for, you have had.
Showing 81–100 of 165 · page 5 of 9
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