“These Dead Have Not Died in Vain”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, included several biblical themes; it even sounded like the King James Bible. The opening—“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty”—recalled texts from the Bible, including the book of Revelation (Revelation 12:5). The Gettysburg Address assessed a year of unprecedented sacrifice on the battlefield. This was also a year of conflicting viewpoints of the war’s moral purpose, especially as deaths multiplied and battles continued with no end in sight. Loss cries out for meaning, and Americans sensed that in 1863. When Americans saw loss on a scale like they did that year, they turned to the Bible to give meaning to the war, much as Lincoln did at Gettysburg.

How to Track Progress

This chapter introduces a second kind of tracking game: progressive tracking games. In it, the authors show how students can use progressive tracking games to develop tracking skills that will become more sophisticated over time, rather than a simple matter of mastering facts. They introduce four levels of tracking that can be used to enhance learning. The levels take ideas and start with (1) definitions, move to (2) learning methods, build to (3) listing examples, and finish with (4) applying ideas in new ways. They introduce a series of games that teachers can use to help students learn how to track more progressively. They draw their examples from literature (The Great Gatsby), history (“The Gettysburg Address”), philosophy (miracles), and poetry (“I Could Not Tell”).

Greece, Rome, and the Revolutionaries of 1916

This chapter argues for a tension in the writings of Patrick Pearse, with some discussion also of Thomas MacDonagh, between commitment to the Gaelic and Catholic movement, which had eclipsed the classicism of earlier political rhetoric, and a marked interest in classical culture. Following an overview of the reception of classical rhetoric in political oratory before Irish independence, Pearse’s essays and speeches are analysed and shown to be permeated with classical tropes. Pearse’s oration for O’Donovan Rossa is discussed in particular detail, and it is suggested that the affinities with Thucydides in this funeral oration may have been mediated by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, with which Pearse was familiar.

The Gettysburg Corpus: Testing the Proposition that All Tense /æ/s Are Created Equal

Corpus studies of regional variation using raw language data from the internet focus predominantly on lexical variables in writing. However, online repositories such as YouTube offer the possibility of investigating regional differences using phonological variables, as well. This paper demonstrates the viability of constructing a naturalistic speech corpus for sociophonetic research by analyzing hundreds of recitations of Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” We first replicate a known result of phonetic research, namely that English vowels are longer in duration before voiced obstruents than before voiceless ones. We then compare /æ/-tensing in recitations from the Inland North and New York City dialect regions. Results indicate that there are significant regional differences in the formant trajectory of the vowel, even in identical phonetic environments (e.g., before nasal codas). This calls into question the uniformity of “/æ/-tensing” as a cross-dialectal phenomenon in American English. We contend that the analysis of spoken data from social media can and should supplement traditional methods in dialectology and variationist analysis to generate new hypotheses about socially conditioned speech patterns.

Democratic Theory as Social Codification

What is democratic theory? In this article we treat it as a semiotic code – that is to say, a shared assumption – and argue that democratic theory enables people to think and talk about the idea(s) of democracy. Furthermore, the application of this specific code is highly political. For one, it is embedded in concrete contexts and discourses and used in arguments and narratives. In addition, the application of democratic theory has also substantial consequences on the lives of people. We illustrate this argument by reflecting briefly on Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and its recodification and consequences in different contexts.

Advanced Education

Advanced education was the most flexible part of the scribal curriculum. It could be tailored to the particular specialty of the scribe: the palace, the temple, commerce, military, etc. The advanced curriculum was often taken from other spheres, such as temple hymns or rituals, and used for scribal study (much like the Gettysburg Address or the “Star-Spangled Banner” might be reused as part of a school curriculum). There is evidence of cuneiform literature including Gilgamesh, Adapa, and law codes like Hammurabi that have been excavated in the southern Levant dating to the second millennium BCE. This provides a tangible vector of transmission for these traditions into the early alphabetic scribal tradition.