Addressing NYC

For the coming month before our election I have installed on these pages Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union Address. A few years ago I attended the Sam Waterston reading/acting of this speech at Cooper Union's Great Hall. The reading was in response to Harold Holzer's book, Lincoln at Cooper Union.

In it's rigorous, often humorous, fashion Lincoln made his simple point about the way politicians skew history and meaning to sway voter's opinion. This is speech that matters because it convinced his skeptical audience through logic and reason delivered with emotion. I am often wishing that our media space allowed for such arguments. Speech was king before soundbites. So, I present the text of this speech on my sidebar and I do believe it resonates today in content and structure. There is an audio player with the Librivox recording and also a link to the C-Span Video Archive where you can watch the whole event above the text.