Describes the events surrounding Abraham Lincoln's historic speech following the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, how he responded to the politics of the time, and the importance of that speech.

The complete text of one of the most important speeches in American history, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to remember not only the grim bloodshed that had just occurred there, but also to remember the American ideals that were being put to the ultimate test by the Civil War. A rousing appeal to the nation’s better angels, The Gettysburg Address remains an inspiring vision of the United States as a country “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

While it is common knowledge that Abraham Lincoln’s writings were influenced by the King James Bible, until now no full-length study has shown the precise ways in which the Gettysburg Address uses its specific language. This revealing investigation provides a new way to think about the speech and its author.

Since its composition in Washington's Willard Hotel in 1861, Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been used to make America and its wars sacred. Few Americans reflect on its violent and redemptive imagery, drawn freely from prophetic passages of the Old and New Testaments, and fewer still think about the implications of that apocalyptic language for how Americans interpret who they are and what they owe the world. In A Fiery Gospel, Richard M. Gamble describes how this camp-meeting tune, paired with Howe's evocative lyrics, became one of the most effective instruments of religious nationalism. He takes the reader back to the song's origins during the Civil War, and reveals how those political and military circumstances launched the song's incredible career in American public life. Gamble deftly considers the idea behind the song—humming the tune, reading the music for us—all while reveling in the multiplicity of meanings of and uses to which Howe's lyrics have been put. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" has been versatile enough to match the needs of Civil Rights activists and conservative nationalists, war hawks and peaceniks, as well as Europeans and Americans. This varied career shows readers much about the shifting shape of American righteousness. Yet it is, argues Gamble, the creator of the song herself—her Abolitionist household, Unitarian theology, and Romantic and nationalist sensibilities—that is the true conductor of this most American of war songs. A Fiery Gospel depicts most vividly the surprising genealogy of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and its sure and certain position as a cultural piece in the uncertain amalgam that was and is American civil religion.

In the tradition of Wills's "Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lincoln's Greatest Speech" combines impeccable scholarship and lively, engaging writing to reveal the full meaning of one of the greatest speeches in the nation's history.

No phrase in American letters has had a more profound influence on church-state law, policy, and discourse than Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state," and few metaphors have provoked more passionate debate.

The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.

The defining rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln – politician, president, and emancipator Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. Whether readers are encountering these classic writings for the first time, or brushing up in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, these slim volumes will serve as a powerful and illuminating resource for scholars, students, and civic-minded citizens. As president, Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that have all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. His words are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. Renowned Lincoln and Civil War scholar Allen C. Guelzo brings together this volume of Lincoln Speeches that span the classic and obscure, the lyrical and historical, the inspirational and intellectual. The book contains everything from classic speeches that any citizen would recognize—the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" Speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address—to the less known ones that professed Lincoln fans will come to enjoy and intellectuals and critics praise. These orations show the contours of the civic dilemmas Lincoln, and America itself, encountered: the slavery issue, state v. federal power, citizens and their duty, death and destruction, the coming of freedom, the meaning of the Constitution, and what it means to progress.

No book was more accessible or familiar to the American founders than the Bible, and no book was more frequently alluded to or quoted from in the political discourse of the age. How and for what purposes did the founding generation use the Bible? How did the Bible influence their political culture? Shedding new light on some of the most familiar rhetoric of the founding era, Daniel Dreisbach analyzes the founders' diverse use of scripture, ranging from the literary to the theological. He shows that they looked to the Bible for insights on human nature, civic virtue, political authority, and the rights and duties of citizens, as well as for political and legal models to emulate. They quoted scripture to authorize civil resistance, to invoke divine blessings for righteous nations, and to provide the language of liberty that would be appropriated by patriotic Americans. Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers broaches the perennial question of whether the American founding was, to some extent, informed by religious--specifically Christian--ideas. In the sense that the founding generation were members of a biblically literate society that placed the Bible at the center of culture and discourse, the answer to that question is clearly "yes." Ignoring the Bible's influence on the founders, Dreisbach warns, produces a distorted image of the American political experiment, and of the concept of self-government on which America is built.