The 19th of November is, by all accounts, a rather momentous day

The 19th of November is, by all accounts, a rather momentous day.

On this day (hashtagOTD), hashtag19 November, the calendar marks a moment of uncommon resonance in the hashtagAmerican narrative: the delivery, in 1863, of hashtagAbraham Lincoln’s hashtagGettysburg Address, a speech so brief and yet so astonishingly consequential that generations of speechwriters have eyed it with equal parts admiration and quiet despair. In a mere 272 words — fewer, one might observe, than the typical modern committee preamble — Lincoln distilled the purpose of a nation at war with itself, reminding the assembled crowd (and posterity) that government “of the people, by the people, for the people” ought not to perish, even if the republic seemed determined to put the matter to the strictest possible test.

The occasion was the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in hashtagGettysburg, hashtagPennsylvania, a pastoral corner of the republic still reverberating with the memory of one of the hashtagCivil War’s bloodiest battles. Lincoln, with his customary economy of expression, imbued the ceremony with a gravitas that has scarcely faded in the century and a half since. The address has come to embody the very ideal of political eloquence — a gold standard against which the rest of us must simply reconcile ourselves to producing merely serviceable prose.

Exactly one hundred years later, on hashtag19 November 1963, Americans gathered once more in Gettysburg to commemorate the centennial of that hallowed oration. The ceremonies were held on the grounds of the National Cemetery itself, where wreaths were laid and dignitaries praised Lincoln’s legacy with the expected solemnity. The sitting hashtagPresident, hashtagJohn F. Kennedy, had been scheduled to attend but, according to the official statement, he was “unwell”. Imagine, then, that three days later (on 22.11.1963) J. F. Kennedy was assassinated in hashtagDallas.

Thus, 19 November emerges not merely as a date in a hashtaghistorical ledger, but as a reminder of rhetoric’s rare potency — and of the delicate, capricious thread with which history so often stitches its moments together.