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Previous | Next :: 150th Anniversary of The Gettysburg Address : Rolling Thunder : DC : USA | November 19, 2013, 10:39 pm

150th Anniversary of The Gettysburg Address : Rolling Thunder : DC : USA
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!50 years today since President Abraham Lincoln's famous 'Gettysburg Address'. It was made at the consecration of a new cemetery opened at the battlefield in honor of the Union Armies dead. In all 50,000 men were killed during the engagement, it was The American Civil War's bloodiest battle.........

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that 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, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

President Abraham Lincoln November 19th, 1863

It went on to be an important statement for most Americans of what defines them, and their country, and is still aspirational for many of what America really could and should be.

Cheers Jez XXXXXXX

PS.......... The American Civil war gave us the first photographs from the battlefield : Photographs from Gettysburg

PPS......... Here is a podcast appreciation of the importance of the famed speech by the BBC's James Naughtie

PPPS.......... Above an image I made in DC at the 'Rolling Thunder' salute to the fallen and the veterans of America's more recent wars.

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