In the opening volley of their opening series on The Great Speeches of History, Sam and Nick discuss the most iconic speech ever delivered by an American president: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. How did a man who never graduated from any school deliver a speech so great that middle schoolers memorize it 150 years later? What rhetorical tricks of the trade make the Gettysburg Address so impactful? And how did Honest Abe outclass an eminent statesman and former Harvard president at Gettysburg? All this, and more, in the inaugural episode of In Pod We Trust. 

Show notes:

Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863)

Lincoln, Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps (1861)

Noah Feldman, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America (2021)

John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008)

The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992)

David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (1995)

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (2005)