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.