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
Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded?
You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.
I have a right to expect better things of you.
Go home and raise your 6,000 extra men.
Needless to say, Lincoln got his Chicago soldiers.
And, reporting the news of the president's assassination on April 15, 1865, the headline of the Chicago Tribune simply reads, Terrible News.
Not long after the Civil War, the whole city burned to the ground, and Chicago became the place where every major architect in the country, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on down to Mies van der Rohe, worked on reinventing what a city skyline is supposed to look like.
Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck revolutionized consumer merchandising with mail-order catalog sales.
Montgomery Ward was just two blocks from Michigan and Wacker.
In 1920, Al Capone came to town.
The same year Prohibition went into effect.
One year after that, Vincent the Schemer Drucci, a member of the Dion O'Banion gang, chased by police, drove onto the Michigan Avenue Bridge just as it was opening to let a boat pass.
He jumped the gap, only to crash straight into the other side.
Decades pass.
Manufacturing at the corner gives way to the service economy.
Now it's all banks and advertising agencies and law firms, skyscrapers instead of warehouses.
Railroads give way to the world's busiest airport on the north side of town.
If I may skip ahead in the interest of finishing this story before tomorrow morning's paper arrives.
For me, by the way, the Tribune chock full of those anti-slavery screeds as usual.
Only an eight-minute walk from the corner is the site of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, the place, you could argue, where modern televised democracy begins, since that's the debate Nixon was said to lose not because of the issues, but because he looked so ghastly sweating under the lights.
Showing 101–120 of 165 · page 6 of 9
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