“The Gettysburg Address was ten sentences long and numbered 272 words. Fittingly, it was here that Lincoln delivered his brief Address on November 19, 1863, arguably the most important political speech in American history. By its end, the tide of the war was turned and the eventual fate of the Confederacy sealed. In July of 1863, near this small town in southern Pennsylvania, tens of thousands of men died in a three-day long conflict. About 600,000 soldiers were killed in some of the most gruesome battles the world had ever seen. The Civil War lasted until 1865 and was the bloodiest American war. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln in the Fall of 1860, the war of words escalated into a full-scale military conflict, with eleven southern states seceding from the Union the following winter. “Why was Gettysburg important? In the mid-nineteenth century, the slavery question plagued Americans, but their political leaders had repeatedly failed to come to grips with it. We asked Dean Jon Gjerde to explain what compelled the the deans to choose Lincoln at Gettysburg as the featured book for On the Same Page for fall 2007.

This year, we’ll all be on the same page reading Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. On the Same Page gives new students in the College of Letters & Science something to talk about: a book by an author who has changed the way we view the world.

Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills