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...
It was seven score and four years ago this day that Pres Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address. He was dedicating a new national cemetery, where over 3,500 soliders from a battle over four months ago had been buried. There is some dispute over what his exact words were that day, with at least six different versions of the 2-minute speech in existence, but there is no doubting the influence it had during the Civil War and the years to follow.
The earliest event that Wiki says happened on this day is “1095 – The Council of Clermont, called by Pope Urban II to discuss sending the First Crusade to the Holy Land, begins” and the most recent is “2002 – The Greek oil tanker Prestige splits in half and sinks off the coast of Galicia, releasing over 20 million US gallons (76,000 m³) of oil in the largest environmental disaster in Spanish and Portuguese history.”
A few other things that also took place on this day are:
1955 – First issue of National Review is published.
1969 – Pete Conrad and Alan Bean become the third and fourth astronauts to land on the Moon, while Richard Gordon became the second one to get so close…yet so far away.
1998 – Impeachment hearings against Pres Clinton are started by the House Judiciary Committee.
Happy birthday to Jodie Foster, Meg Ryan, Tommy Thompson, Ted Turner, Dick Cavett, and Larry King.