Gettysburg Address -- ". . . a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

 Memorial in Gettysburg N. P. designating site of Lincoln's famous address 150 years ago today, Nov. 19, 1863.

Thoughts on The Gettysburg Address, delivered by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Nearly all Americans know the opening of this speech: "Four score and seven years ago . . . . "

Garry Wills's "Lincoln at Gettysburg" does the math on this opening line. We all should. Subtract "four score and seven years" from 1863 and what do you get? You get 1776. After his now famous opening line, Lincoln continues, " our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

The U. S Constitution, written in 1787, ratified in 1788, was not our founding document. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was. There is where we find the guiding philosophy underpinning our new nation.

Conservatives always, and Trumpists today, revere and use to their power-hungry advantage the minority control elements in the Constitution--the electoral college, the two senators for every state, daunting ratification hurdles, even the acceptance and support of slavery in its later, racist configurations. The very concept of "democracy" puts them on edge, creates strains of denial in their thinking, dangerous defenses in their actions.

It can all be confounding, perplexing. Many of us were taught from elementary school into high school to revere the Constitution as a genius created "bundle of compromises," even a permanent, almost god-given, document. It's not. Maybe for the day (eleven score and fifteen years ago), but not for the ages. Lincoln ended his great speech at Gettysburg with this admonition: "[we] 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."

It's time. Again.

 

Jill Lepore -- Poe and His Times Profile

Poe’s Hat.

There is no telling what ever happened to Poe’s hat. When he was found at a Baltimore polling place four days before his death, someone had already stolen it and replaced it with a cheaper one. As a witness, Dr. Joseph Snodgrass, later wrote, Poe’s “hat, or rather the hat of somebody else, for he had evidently been robbed of his clothing, or cheated in an exchange, was a cheap palm leaf one, without a band, and soiled.” It appears someone may have purloined Poe’s hat and likely disposed of it at some point without ever realizing (or caring) that it had once belonged to a famous poet.


https://www.poemuseum.org/blog/what-ever-happened-to-poes-hat/

Poe in Paris

New York Times  April 20, 2012
Poe Taunts Filmmakers Evermore
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

IT’S probably safe to assume that Edgar Allan Poe does not rest quietly in the Baltimore grave that claimed him, at 40, in 1849. In the works that made him famous — poems like “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” — death is never quite the end: something lives on, not happily.

Poe died nearly half a century before the invention of cinema, but the movies knew a kindred spirit when they saw one, and began almost immediately to stir his ashes and rattle his crumbling bones. . . .

GO HERE

[A new movie on Poe, The Raven, opens on April 20, 2012.]

The Great Bad Writer

The great bad writer
Kevin Jackson
  22nd February 2012  —  Issue 192

Self-indulgent, vulgar, borderline insane—Edgar Allan Poe was the most influential American author of the 19th century

GO HERE FOR FULL ARTICLEhttp://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/02/the-great-bad-writer-edgar-allan-poe-raven-cusack/

End of the line for Poe tradition?

Gravesite tradition to end.