The Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was dedicated on this date in 1863, a few months after the Civil War battle was waged there. Senator Edward Everett was the keynote speaker, as it were, and he delivered a two-hour-long oration.

President Abraham Lincoln immediately followed Senator Everett’s with his own speech, one that took only two minutes to deliver. His ten sentences, the Gettysburg Address, is the one remembered to this date.

The photo at top was taken on that day by Matthew Brady. President Lincoln is seen at center, surrounded by onlookers. The website this is from highlighted him in light brown.

The address:

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. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
 
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a film of a play based on Ken Kesey’s novel of the same name, opened in movie theaters on this date in 1975.

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Franz Schubert died on this date in 1828. Emma Lazarus died on this date in 1887. Mike Nichols died two years ago today.

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Larry King is 83 today. Jack Welch is 81. Personal hero of mine Dick Cavett is 80 today. Ted Turner is 78 today. Senator Tom Harkin is 77 today. Sharon Olds is 74. Calvin Klein is 74. Charlie Kaufman is 58. Michael Wilbon is 58. Meg Ryan is 55. Jodie Foster is 54.

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