LITERARY SELECTIONS

Home | Harlem Renaissance Poems | The World on the Turtle's Back | The Coyote and the Buffalo | Fox and Coyote and Whale | La Relacion | Of Plymouth Plantation | The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano | My Sojourn in the Lands of My Ancestors | Bradstreet poems | Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God | Speech in the Virginia Convention | The Devil and Tom Walker | Emerson Essays | Thoreau Essays | Walden | Whitman poems | Moby Dick | Masque of the Red Death | The Raven | The Cask of the Amontillado | Tell Tale Heart | Pit and the Pendulum | The Black Cat | "The Minister's Black Veil" | "Young Goodman Brown" | A Rose for Emily | The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | "Stanzas on Freedom" and "Free Labor" | An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge | A Mystery of Heroism | Gettysburg Address | Coming of Age in Mississippi | Newspaper Article on Sit-Ins of 1960's | "Frederick Douglass" | "Ballad of Birmingham" | Newspaper Article on Church Bombing in Birmingham in 1960's | Autobiography of Mark Twain | Life on the Mississippi | The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County | The Outcasts of Poker Flat | The Story of an Hour | The Yellow Wallpaper | Dickinson poems | Sandburg poems | Spoon River Anthology - Masters | Dunbar poems | Hughes poems | Johnson poems | Frost poems | The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
Gettysburg Address

Four score 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 battlefield 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.