Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address 150 Year Anniversary 19 November 2013

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”
~ Abraham Lincoln, 19 November 1863

Google Cultural Institute

Googlers today may notice a link below the Google search box stating, “150 years ago, a 2-minute speech shaped a nation. Read Lincoln’s handwritten words.” The link is an invitation to visit the Google Cultural Institute where Google has assembled and elegantly delivers historic and cultural presentations. On the 150 year anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, several exhibits are featured and available online:

• Inspired by the Gettysburg Address By Daniel W. Stowell for Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
• Lincoln’s Gettysburg Addresses by Matthew Pinsker
• Remembering Lincoln at Gettysburg by Cornell University Library

Full Text of Gettysburg Address

Among the many copies made of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the following text is considered the most accurate.

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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not 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.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863