Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: Given November 19, 1863 on the Battlefield Near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA

It is 272 words. Abraham Lincoln spoke them in two minutes. Yet the Gettysburg Address has done more to define the promise and peril of American democracy than any document in the nation's history. Delivered on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of a cemetery for soldiers killed in the Civil War's bloodiest battle, Lincoln's speech does not simply honor the dead. It redefines why they died. In ten sentences, the president transforms a war to preserve the Union into a test of whether a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" can endure. The language is plain. The stakes are everything. And the final invocation that democratic government "of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" remains, over a century later, either a warning or a promise. This is a text meant to be read slowly, aloud, more than once. It is brief enough to memorize and profound enough to spend a lifetime pondering.