![]() ![]() Why should we be interested in Protestants who fled Charles I during the Great Migration? Because “the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire,” Vowell writes. ![]() ![]() ![]() Vowell’s eponymous shipmates are the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 – 10 years after the Mayflower Pilgrims settled Plymouth. In her new book, The Wordy Shipmates, one of her more outrageous parallels compares the Pequot war, in which 700 Indians were murdered in Mystic Fort, with a frustrated skateboarder’s “destructive tantrum.” Vowell is a master of the unexpected angle or pop-culture connection used to confer fresh relevance on often dowdy subjects. Her last book, “Assassination Vacation,” chronicled a quirky road trip stalking the murder sites – now tourist pit stops – of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Hers is emphatically not the history taught in high school – often a target of her sarcastic wit. Sarah Vowell, a popular contributor to public radio’s “ This American Life,” is an American-history buff with a self-proclaimed predilection for Puritan New England, the Civil War, and bloodbaths. ![]()
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