Nate Thiel - Outside Reading 1

I have been reading the book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, by Garry Wills. It is supposed to be about what Abraham Lincoln did at Gettysburg to change the world, yet I have read Lincoln’s name maybe five times total in the eighty or so pages assigned to us. It seems to me that the book is more of a story about how speeches are given after a battle, rather Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg. The transcendental declaration that Wills speaks of is that of the Gettysburg Address. In the book, Wills writes that none of the great things during the time of the Address are mentioned during Lincoln’s speech. However, I believe that all of these things – the Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg, the Union, and the South – are implied in the Gettysburg Address because if Lincoln were to talk about each of these things individually, he would have spoken for a very long time.