GettysBlog

November 19, 1863

On this date 145 years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered the speech that has come to be known as the Gettysburg Address.

In recent interviews, President-elect Barack Obama, has stated that one of the things that he is doing in preparation for his presidency is to reread Lincoln's writings. Let us pause on this historic anniversary and read Lincoln's 272 word speech again.

Full text of Cornell's Bancroft Copy of the Gettysburg Address.

Reading of the Gettysburg Address from Ken Burn's film, The Civil War:

We live in historic times. Let us hope that this nation shall now finally have Lincoln's "new birth of freedom."

2008 Reading Project Essay Contest Winners

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Michele Moody-Adams is pleased to announce the winners in this year's New Student Reading Project Essay Contest. Class of 2012 students were sent 10 study questions along with their copy of Lincoln at Gettysburg last summer and asked to complete a short essay based on one of these questions.

Each of the 10 contest winners will receive a $200 gift certificate from The Cornell Store. The 5 students who earned Honorable Mention will each receive a $50 gift certificate.

Read their winning essays.

Congratulations to all of our winning readers and writers.

Now to wait and see what next year's book will be.  Keep reading!

Lincoln and Ithaca

Students participating in the Ithaca High School Combined Class Read this year are reading Garry Wills' book, Lincoln at Gettysburg. They are studying the Greek roots of Lincoln's oration and the influence of the Ancient Greeks upon American culture (e.g. Greek Revival architecture). They are also examining presidential politics in this election year.

On Friday, October 17th they visit the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Goldwin Smith Hall, and the Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections in Kroch Library, where they will view and discuss a selection of Lincoln and Greek materials in the Cornell collections, including the Bancroft Copy of the Gettysburg Address and a newly acquired copy of the first English language edition of Thucydides published in 1550.

A digital Lincoln at Gettysburg: Ithaca High School guide of their Library tour will allow the IHS students to return to campus virtually and learn more about the books, documents, and art objects they saw during their visit.

Pictured here is a wooden parade ax used by supporters of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential campaign.

Below is an image of a 1913 postcard of Goldwin Smith Hall.

The Words That Remake America

We have read and discussed Lincoln's words at the various Reading Project events.  We have noted and appreciated his rhetoric and phrasing:  "all men are created equal," "new birth of freedom," and "government of the people, by the people, for the people."  But we have not mentioned the words that have the potential to truly remake America: apathy, indifference, ignorance, and intolerance.

As the old adage goes, actions speak louder than words.

Was it apathy then that kept more students from coming to hear Garry Wills' talk last night? Was it indifference that motivated so many students to leave Barton Hall before the group discussion was over a few weeks ago?  Yes, it was hot in there, but why were these students so uninterested in this discussion?  Especially in an historic election year when these topics and Lincoln's words have resonated in our daily news headlines.

Democracy is participatory. In order to function properly it requires an informed citizenry to educate itself about the issues and problems it faces, and to act on those issues.

Democracy is a privilege, just as a Cornell education is a privilege. Both require you to think.  Both require some effort and hard work.

As we finish with our daily postings to this blog, I hope that our readers will keep Lincoln in mind. Next year we will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth and Cornell will be celebrating his life and accomplishments with a major exhibition in Kroch Library.

I have enjoyed discussing Lincoln with you all. Keep reading. Stay curious. Know better.

[Flickr image of Mount Rushmore by lmbaker3.]

Garry Wills at Cornell

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 150 Years Later
September 17, 2008 - 7:00PM to 8:00PM
Garry Wills, historian and author of Lincoln at Gettysburg will be speaking on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

LOCATION: Statler Auditorium
SPEAKER: Garry Wills
ADMISSION: Open to Public, Alumni, Students, Faculty, and Staff.
ADMISSION INFO: Free, but tickets are required. Tickets may be picked up at the Willard Straight Ticket Office beginning Sept. 11.

Sponsored by University Lectures Committee and the Office of the Provost.

For those of you wanting to read more of Garry Wills' writing, here are a few recent New York Times Op Ed pieces and his essays from the New York Review of Books:

McCain's McGovern Moment, September 3, 2008                                                         

Two Presidents Are Worse Than One, January 26, 2008

Garry Wills at The New York Review of Books

Come hear about the most famous debates in American political history.

What Are You Reading?

Since finishing Lincoln at Gettysburg, I have been reading the Geraldine Brooks novel, March, which the Tompkins Country Public Library has selected for their community read this year.  It was an imaginative and inventive story that blended fact and fiction. Real people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau make cameo appearances and interact with fictional characters. A good read.

What are you reading now?  I have heard from my colleagues that many of you did not like reading Lincoln at Gettysburg, and I have even heard some complain that students just don't read anymore. Can this be true? In our digital age of instance information, do books still matter?

At my Reading Project small group discussion two weeks ago I asked my students what books they would like to see selected for future Reading Projects. Their suggestions included such classics as Brave New World, Catch 22, A Tale of Two Cities, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and 1984. (How many of these have you read?)

More recent books recommended were The Things They Carried and the current bestseller Three Cups of Tea. Three of the students suggested that we read The Kite Runner and another requested that we read the graphic novel, Persepolis. Hmm. Reading a graphic novel for the Project could be quite interesting.

Many of these students were biology majors and they had two non-fiction book recommendations as well: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA and The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Seems to me that these students still read.

There are just so many good books out there. So let me ask all of you the same question:

What books would you recommend we read for next year's Reading Project?

Our Civil War Seen Through Chilean Eyes

The Chilean intellectual, journalist and writer, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, visited the United States from 1865 to 1867. While staying there he worked as a war correspondent, reporting on the Civil War and other aspects of North American society.

War is a recurrent theme with Vicuña Mackenna. He not only wrote on the American Civil War but was also a close witness of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. His writings were regularly published by Chile’s most prestigious newspaper: El Mercurio.

Mackenna’s journey and experiences in the U.S. were collected in his book, Ten Month Mission in the United States of North America as Chile’s Confidential Agent, published a few months after his return to Chile. In this book he refers to the United States as “a great country with enormous potential for development.”

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This is the third and final post to this blog by Claudia Gilardoni, a librarian from Chile who visited Cornell last spring. She has provided us with an international perspective of the Gettysburg Address and the American Civil. I want to thank her and our Cornell student blogger, Ariela Rutkin-Becker, for their efforts and their insights.

And don't forget that author Garry Wills will be on campus next Wednesday night to speak about the Lincoln Douglas debates.

In the News

I wanted to share two recent news items with our Lincoln at Gettysburg readers.

Did you hear that President Bush visited Gettysburg last week? He and a small entourage that included former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former White House political adviser Karl Rove, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and Karen Hughes, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs for the State Department were given a tour of the battlefield by Gabor Boritt, author of The Gettysburg Gospel and director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Their tour began at the Virginia Memorial, one of over 1,300 monuments at the Gettysburg National Military Park, and included a visit to the park's new Museum and Visitor Center.

Here in Ithaca, Cornell Professor Ross Brann, posted some comments about the New Student Reading Project in his Cornell Daily Sun blog, which were then reprinted in the Chronicle Online. He asks us: What are we doing here at Cornell? I don't believe that is a rhetorical question. Would any of you like to comment on his observations?

And there you have it. Presidents visiting battlefields. Professors setting challenges for their students. All of us settling into our fall semester schedules and routines.

[Image of the Virginia Memorial at Gettysburg is from adamr.stone's flickr site.]

Get Linc'ed at the Tatkon Center

President Skorton will kickoff Cornell's student voter registration drive tomorrow afternoon, September 6, at 4:30 p.m. at the Balch Courtyard Terrace (rain location Carol Tatkon Center Room 3330). He will read the Gettysburg Address and talk about the power of words to change our world.

Check out all of the events happening this month at the Tatkon Center.

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Maps

In Lincoln at Gettysburg  Garry Wills gives us a fascinating analysis of the political and cultural background of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the events preceding it. With Mapping the Paths to the Address we're attempting to put the ideas and events discussed in Lincoln at Gettysburg in a geographic context. Wills describes how Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to deliver the Address and the care with which it was composed.  Wills reviews the national events that brought Lincoln to the dedication of the Memorial Cemetery, the dedication which provided the occasion for the address.  Wills's analysis includes an overview of the bitter sectionalism that led up to the war and the oratory used to defend each side.

Since Wills spends less time on the progress of the war itself, including the battle,  we have provided maps that can help the reader of Lincoln at Gettysburg understand the historical moment in the course of the war and the underlying geography of both the war and the battle. One of the maps, for example, is a watercolor showing the topography of the battlefield at the time of the battle without reference to the military situation. This is one of an interesting series of battlefield maps produced by an (almost) local cartographer, Earl McElfresh of Olean, NY. ( http://www.mcelfreshmap.com/ ) Other maps show us the military situation and the battle itself.

Wills draws strong parallels between Lincoln's Address and other funeral oratories. He is particularly interested in the influence of Pericles' Funeral Oration as reported in Thycidide History. Even rather abstract notions such as classical Greek rhetoric and the epitaphios developed in a real place: the Athens of 430 BC, and Athens can be located and reconstructed on a map in a way that adds to our understanding of the Funeral Oration.

We have also chosen maps which tell us something about the country in the years preceding the Civil War--the political trauma already in evidence 10 years earlier with the Missouri Compromise, and a map using the contemporary 1860 Census to provide a statistical and geographical analysis of slavery and another map showing the routes of the Underground Railway.

One of the maps has a local interest. We display several maps showing the the infrastructure of the nation on the verge of the war. Of particular importance is the uneven development of the railroad systems in the North and South. Paralleling that uneven development is the growth of the telegraph system. In Ezra Cornell's papers we found a unique undated map of the telegraph system in the United States, but it is clearly from sometime in the 1850's, at the period when Cornell was forming the Western Union Telegraph Company.

We've also mounted the plans of several rural garden cemeteries including the plans for the Gettysburg Cemetery, and a modern map of the park and its monuments.

Wills weaves together many strands of cultural material to give us a new understanding and appreciation of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We hope this map exhibit will help you put some of those materials into a geographic context and enhance your engagement with Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Mapping the Paths to the Address is mounted on the back wall of the Media Center. This is not an ideal venue, but mounting it there allowed us to keep Cartobibulosity up in the map display cases for some wine events scheduled for later in the Fall. We hope you'll still be able to enjoy it. Of course, we'd appreciate any feedback at all about either exhibit. We are working on putting the exhibit online so that everyone has a chance to see it.

Bob Kibbee, Maps and Geospacial Information Collection