America at 250: A View from the Streets

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and I'm Jill Lepore, sitting in today for David Remnick. This is the second part of our special episode on America at 250. In the first part, we listened to excerpts from a documentary that asked Americans in the 1970s how they felt about the bicentennial. We have a long way to go, baby, as Billy Jean King might have paraphrased it.

I love that style of documentary so much, the tradition that journalists call Vox pop, that I wanted to hear what it would sound like if we made a piece like that for the radio hour today. So we collaborated with an organization of audio stories. storytellers known as transom. They sent producers to Illinois and California, Louisiana, Vermont, Utah. They went to gas stations and city parks, to malls and street corners, to dairy farms, to listen to us, to Americans.

Because here's what I think. You could talk to politicians, you could talk to scholars, pundits, reporters, but what this moment means, I think you'll find that right here. We're doing a radio program about the 250th anniversary of America. Can we ask you a couple questions? Oh, sure.

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