President George Washington’s First Inaugural Speech

As a follow up to the previous post about the eyewitness account of  George Washington’s 1789 inauguration, below are excerpts from the May 6, 1789 Massachusetts Centinel, which contains descriptions of the inauguration as well as the full text of Washington’s first inaugural speech, one of America’s 100 milestone documents.

Three Cheers for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is easily one the most famous speeches in American history. For collectors of historic newspapers, the speech is one of the most difficult to find printed in an 1863 paper. According to Wikipedia, “despite the speech’s prominent place in the history and popular culture of the United States, the exact wording ...