The Gettysburg Address

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, ten sentences long, delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg after the Union forces had won an important battle with the Confederates. Opening with “ Four score and seven years ago,” it became one of the most influential statements of national purpose, asserting that America was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and “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.” Among those inspired were Martin Luther King Jr whose “I have a dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial 100 years later, echoed Lincoln’s opening words.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Catherine Clinton No other episodes
  Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas and International Professor at Queen's University, Belfast
• Susan-Mary Grant 3 episodes
  Professor of American History at Newcastle University
• Tim Lockley 4 episodes
  Professor of American History at the University of Warwick

Reading list

• The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech that Nobody Knows
  Gabor Boritt (Simon & Schuster, 2006) Google Books →
• Lincoln: A life of Purpose and Power
  Richard Carwardine (Knopf Publishing Group, 2006) Google Books →
• The Gettysburg Address: Perspectives on Lincoln's Greatest Speech
  Sean Conant (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2015) Google Books →
• Writing the Gettysburg Address
  Martin P. Johnson (University Press of Kansas, 2013) Google Books →
• Gettysburg Replies: The World Responds to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
  Carla Knorowski (ed.) (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2015)
• The Long Shadow of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
  Jared Peatman (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America
  Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 1992) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b07c2w5j

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07c2w5j

Auto-category: 973 (United States history during Civil War and Reconstruction period)