Fasttrack to America's Past
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Page 136
 Page 136 - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

The reading selection

   This reading is the full text of President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  Notice that the speech was not made immediately after the battle at Gettysburg, but more than four months later.  The occasion was the dedication of a new national cemetery at the battlefield.

   Lincoln was not the main speaker that day in November, and the speech drew little notice at first.  But over time, it became famous for its noble expressions honoring the dead soldiers and the principles of the American nation.


The pictures

1.  The Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania.  A scandal erupted over the delay in properly burying soldiers who died.  Partly to smooth over the uproar, a national cemetery was created at the battlefield and dignitaries were invited to the dedication.

2.  Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States during the Civil War.  He believed the Union had to be preserved intact at all costs, and resisted calls for a negotiated peace with the South.
 

The tasks for this page

   This reading is followed by directions for marking and highlighting key points and passages.  Discuss with students the point of highlighting and marking up text for close study.  Highlighting text can be very useful, but too much highlighting is useless. 

1.  Above the words "Four score and seven years" students should write the number 87.  (4 times 20, plus 7 = 87; also, 1863 minus 1776 = 87)

2.  Students should highlight the phrases "a new nation, conceived in liberty" and "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

3.  Students should highlight the phrase "a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

4.  Students should highlight: "we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion" and perhaps also "we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom..."






Copyright Notice

   Copyright 2018 by David Burns.  All rights reserved.  Illustrations and reading selections appearing in this work are taken from sources in the public domain and from private collections used by permission.  Sources include: the Dover Pictorial Archive, the Library of Congress, The National Archives, The Hart Publishing Co., Corel Corporation and its licensors, Nova Development Corporation and its licensors, and others.  Maps were created or adapted by the author using reference maps from the United States Geological Survey and Cartesia Software.  Please see the home page for this title for more information.