Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America

We’re ringing in the 250th anniversary of the United States with an episode on Garry Wills’s superb, Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade the America. It’s central argument is that Abraham Lincoln succeeded in revolutionizing how Americans thought of the founding of their country, especially the Declaration of Independence, with the Gettysburg Address—a revolution not just in “thought” but in “style,” one that placed the Declaration’s assertion of equality at the very center of our political tradition. The book is one that only Garry Wills could have written, with his PhD in Classics allowing him to compare Lincoln’s “funeral oration” to that of Pericles, with his long meditation on the American presidency and leadership preparing him to grasp the enormity of the task Lincoln set himself, and with his time at National Review in his youth helping him understand why the American right never forgave Lincoln for succeeding. We discuss all this and more in our conversation about one of our favorite writer’s very best books.
Tickets for Sam’s events: Tuesday with Tad Devine / Thursday with Dan Denvir. 
Previous KYE episodes on Garry Wills:
Nixon Agonistes
The Kennedy Imprisonment (w/ Jeet Heer)
Bomb Power (w/ Madeleine Baker)
Sources:
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)
— Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)
— “Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case!” Esquire, Aug 1, 1968
— “The Blind Teach Us to See,” Boston Globe, Aug 20, 1970
Abraham Lincoln, “Letter to Joshua Speed,” Aug 24, 1855
Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959)
Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974)
Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970)
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