This Day in History 11.19.09

On this day, November 19, in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the Solders' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Considered one of the greatest speeches in American history, it only lasted two minutes. No photograph exists of Lincoln making this speech because the photographer didn't realize the speech would be so short. By the time he was set up to take a picture, Lincoln had finished.

Fourscore 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 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.