You don't need to be told who Sarah Vowell is anymore. You can immediately recognize her voice from years and years of This American Life appearances, her role in The Incredibles, and her road-trip ready audio books, especially Assassination Vacation. Maybe you find her nasal tone irritating, maybe you don't, but you know that she has an uncanny ability to nail down the unique contradictions to be found in the stories of Americans. You also know, or at least you should, that she's a lot smarter than you. Her new book is The Wordy Shipmates, which delves into the history of the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century. Vowell is in town tonight for a reading at the Avalon Theater at 8:15 p.m., sponsored by Politics and Prose. Tickets are already sold-out, but if you're a Vowell disciple, that probably won't stop you from heading down to the theater tonight to see if you can snag an extra from someone on their way in. Vowell took some time to chat with DCist last week.

So, why Puritans?

I guess I had been thinking about John Winthrop a lot, starting on Sept. 11 and then we went into the war in Iraq, and it all just kind of came crashing down on me watching Ronald Reagan's funeral. When Sandra Day O'Conner was reading "A Model of Christian Charity" at the funeral, that's the sermon that gives us the "City upon a Hill" soundbite that president Reagan was so very fond of. So she's reading that and she gets to the part of the sermon that says, "the eyes of all people are upon us." It was right after the Abu Ghraib photos came out, and I had just been to NYU to see Al Gore give a speech where he called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, and the speech was all about how not only were those atrocities generally sinister, but that it was a betrayal of American exceptionalism. And of course Rumsfeld was sitting there in the National Cathedral with the president, and it just seemed like a good time to go back and look into the foundations of American exceptionalism and write about the people, the New England Puritans, specifically the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who gave us the idea of ourselves as a city upon a hill. They gave us the idea of ourselves as God's new chosen people.

Did you approach your investigation into those ideas expecting to find that we've gone against them?

I don't think we've gone against them, I think we totally still believe it. I say in the book, even I most of the time probably still believe we're God's chosen people, and I don't even believe in God. It's such an innate part of the American DNA. The average American, and myself included, we can't really get away from it, and history bears it out. We're pretty much the superpower. There isn't really getting past it, but you can question it and be aware of it. Barack Obama actually uses the words "American exceptionalism" in interviews fairly often. But I think I can tell that he has a sense of responsibility about that. The thing I say about Winthrop and his shipmates and especially "A Model of Christian Charity" is that to him, the idea of being a city upon a hill isn't just about being a beacon of hope, it could also be the opposite. I mean, he's terrified that they will fail and disappoint their God and incur their God's wrath. To say that "the eyes of all people are upon us," he also means everyone's watching and if we fail, we fail big, and we fail in sight of everyone and we fall harder because we go higher. It would be nice if we were a little more mindful of this tendency of ours. My favorite image of 17th century New England is the official seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which is the Indian saying, "come over and help us," which is ironic considering that within a few years of getting there that colony literally burned alive 700 Pequot, for example. The idea that they had about themselves was that the Indians needed their help, that they were coming over to help, we're here to help whether you want our help or not. That seems to be kind of the M.O. of the United States as well.

When I went to school, I was taught that America never lost a war, and I started kindergarten in 1975, four months after the helicopters are being whooshed out of Saigon. I just don't like this idea that we have of ourselves that we're infallible. You think we would maybe proceed with a little more caution perhaps in the world stage if we were aware of our own shortcomings.

Since you've written this book, are there elements of modern society where you now can't help but notice this heritage of puritanical doctrine and beliefs?

Well right, like when Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press during the buildup to the war in Iraq, with this statement that we'll be greeted as liberators. He might as well have just morphed into the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But also, with Winthrop and his crowd, there was a tendency to say one thing about themselves and be another, and I think we definitely have that. "Model of Christian Charity" is all about generosity and brotherhood and suffering together and mourning together, but anyone who disagreed with the clergy or the magistrate was banished. One guy I write about had his ear sliced off for saying seditious things about the clergy and magistrate. And then, even that speech itself, I write about how it was quoted by Reagan, and same thing. Reagan was going around quoting from this sermon that's about charity and generosity to get himself elected and re-elected, in order to preside over an administration that is at its core about a complete and total lack of charity and generosity. He's quoting from a sermon that says "if your brother's in need, and you love God, if you can help him, then thou must help him," and Reagan is quoting [this] while he's slashing the budget for housing and urban development, cutting school lunch programs, and not mentioning AIDS until thousands of people are dead from it. I guess it's ironic at the very least, but I'd also say it's phony, and disingenuous and offensive.

So would John Winthrop have fit in with the Bush Administration?

This administration, especially the president himself in terms of theology, is actually a descendant of Anne Hutchinson, the woman heretic who John Winthrop banishes from Massachusetts. She has this very cockamamie, emotional form of Christianity that's about a direct relationship with God, she says she hears the voice of God and that she's filled with the Holy Spirit, and to the Puritan higher-ups, this is just blasphemy. The fact that the president is an inheritor of this more ecstatic, loosey-goosey, overly emotional, gut-level of Christianity, Winthrop would probably be horrified by that. They're very Biblical, Calvinists, their approach to religion is highly intellectual. And the president, as we know, is all about his gut. None of that book learning. Puritans are all about book learning.

So they're the snobby elites?

The Puritans? Yeah. That's why I like them. That's one thing that's very admirable about them. They're obsessed with learning and knowledge and scholarship and expertise. They've barely built their own houses and they're building Harvard, because they want their sons and especially their future ministers to be fluent in Hebrew and Latin and Greek, and to be able to discuss all the great theological texts of Europe and the ancient world. These are people who wrote poetry in Latin, they're incredibly brainy people, which is another reason I wanted to write about them. More than anything, they were thinkers and writers, and I don't like how their image is often stereotyped that they're stupid. That probably comes from all the silliness in Salem, which came much later after Winthrop was dead. They're essentially literary.

Yeah, the list of primary sources at the end of your book is pretty daunting.

Um, yeah.

How long did it take you to do all that reading and research? Were there tomes that were just incredibly difficult to get through? I imagine that the language they were written in was a little dense.

Oh, yeah. I think I mention that I really feel for the scholar who edited the volume of Roger Williams's correspondence. A two-page letter by Williams will have 30-something footnotes, because Williams alludes to sometimes several Bible verses in one sentence, so sometimes unpacking all that theology gets a little tricky. I definitely culled through a lot of dense texts, and hopefully I pilfered out the juicier bits.

In fact, when I was recording the audio book, I was using various actors to be the different Puritans, and I never noticed it until we were putting the audio book script together, but it's rare that I let one of the Puritans have an entire sentence. I frequently quote only part of a sentence, I'm quoting the understandable bit, and then the part that needs to be deciphered I will kind of translate that a little bit. I am kind of proud in just a general knowledge sense, this book is absolutely for the general reader, and at the very least it's definitely one of the breezier books on the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

I would say so.

So I'm a little bit proud of that, and maybe that's one reason why these people are a little bit forgotten is that they were really so much smarter than us and were just so well educated and heady that it's harder for the general reader to dig in, compared to say Lincoln or somebody, who's such a clear literary stylist. Reading the speeches of Lincoln is nothing but a pleasure, where there are certain sermons from the Puritans that are definitely a pleasure to read, but not all of them.

Presumably you had a pretty good grasp of the colonists's behavior toward the Native Americans before you started writing ...

Yeah, that part of it is not complicated at all.

Did you uncover anything that actually shocked you?

I don't know about shocked. I mean, it is shocking, the idea of burning 700 people alive is shocking, which they did to the Pequot, babies included. Baby burning is always pretty shocking.

But I do talk about my own little epiphany I had with my own background, being part Cherokee, and the Cherokee are one of the so-called five civilized tribes, and always prided themselves on their civilized behavior. And to me, that aspect of Cherokee heritage always made me a little uncomfortable, because I just felt like the English showed up and the Cherokee just dropped everything they were doing and said, "sounds good to me," and immediately converted to Christianity and wanted to become white southerners to the extent that they owned black slaves. There's nothing Geronimo about the Cherokee, and I always wondered, where was their backbone? And then when I was researching the big plague, the one that happened essentially right after the first European contact, and I was specifically researching the plague that happened amongst the Native American population in Massachusetts between 1616 and 1619. The reason that the Pilgrims and the Puritans can sort of swoop in and settle Massachusetts was that pretty much the entire native population was killed off by this small pox epidemic. That basically happened up and down the Americas starting in 1492, starting from fisherman and traders and explorers, that initial contact brought so many germs that some scholars estimate as much as 90 percent of the native population of the Americas was wiped out even before organized colonization started.

So I was reading all that and then I came across one sentence from some anthropologist who said that when the Cherokee suffered through an epidemic like that, their priests destroyed all the idols of the tribe. Basically, they abandoned their God, because God had abandoned them. And that was just a light bulb moment, it was like, oh, that's why when the English show up and they're so healthy and their God protects them from all these horrible diseases and epidemics, that's why the English ways and especially English religion and education would seem so attractive. So that answered that little thing that had pretty much nagged me my entire life.

There's a line in your book where you talk about how the Puritans that you're writing about would be totally horrified by the idea of Thanksgiving. You said they'd think, "what if we didn't deserve it this year?" Are you planning on celebrating Thanksgiving any differently this year?

Oh, do I deserve it? I probably never deserve it. (laughs) I mean I basically ignore Plymouth and everything we think of as the classic Thanksgiving story, so probably not. I'll be in Hawaii for Thanksgiving actually. It is interesting though how things filtered down from colonial Massachusetts, we get this holiday, Thanksgiving, that to the Puritans, Thanksgiving was definitely a conditional event, and you couldn't have Thanksgiving unless you deserved it. More frequently they would fast to atone for however they had offended the almighty. The idea that Thanksgiving would be a day in the calendar would be blasphemous to them. And I write about how their Thanksgivings were often pretty disgusting, in that they feel like they deserve a Thanksgiving after the massacre of the Pequot, because God had clearly given the English this victory and destroyed their enemy so mightily. It's really gross to have a party to celebrate that babies got burned alive.

So you're heading to Hawaii, and I understand that your next book is set in Hawaii?

Yeah I think so, it'll be about the history of Hawaii, pretty much a story I'm always attracted to which is how white people messed things up. Basically from European contact with Captain Cook through probably statehood. It's kind of a sequel to the Puritans book, actually, because the history of Hawaii, especially in the 19th century has to do with immigrants from New England, both the missionaries who settled Hawaii and the whalers from Salem and Massachusetts, so Hawaii is basically Massachusetts part two. I don't know if you've ever been to Hawaii, but there are so many congregational churches built by missionaries from New England, that you can barely drive 20 miles down any back road on any island in Hawaii and you'll come across a church that looks like it's straight out of a Massachusetts village.

I've never been to Hawaii, I had no idea about that.

It's pretty great.

I bet. So are you going to watch the debate tonight?

Oh yeah.

Here in D.C., people gather, you know every bar in town will be packed tonight with people watching the debate. Do people do the same kind of thing in New York?

There's a little bit of that, sure, but it's not like D.C. I lived in D.C. for a little bit of time after college, and it seemed like people gather in D.C. to watch specific votes on C-SPAN.

Ha, sometimes.

I can imagine a real showbiz event like a debate would be like that times ten.

Where did you live when you lived here?

Adams Morgan, over by the Zoo.

When was that?

1993.

Oh wow, so have you seen Adams Morgan since then?

I guess I've been to Dupont Circle a few times but, no, why?

It's pretty different.

It was all like, Ethiopian restaurants as I recall.

Well all of 18th Street is now one bar after another, it's where people get drunk and throw up in the street.

I just remember it was the fall, and coming from Montana where it's mostly evergreen trees, I was so charmed by my whole neighborhood, all the sidewalks were carpeted with leaves. It was very picturesque.