Pericles' Funeral Oration is the speech that the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered in the winter of 431/430 BC at the public burial of the citizens who had died in the first year of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. It survives only in the History of Thucydides, who heard Pericles speak and who says of the speeches in his work that he kept as close as he could to the general sense of what was actually said.
Genre
Oratory
The First Oration Against Catiline is the speech Cicero, as consul, delivered to the Roman senate on 8 November 63 BC in the temple of Jupiter Stator, with Lucius Sergius Catilina himself sitting among the senators. Catiline, twice defeated for the consulship and deep in debt, had been organizing a rising: his ally Gaius Manlius was raising an army in Etruria, and on the night of 6-7 November conspirators met at the house of Marcus Laeca, where two men undertook to murder Cicero at his morning reception.
The Leipzig Disputation was a formal academic debate held in the great hall of the Pleissenburg, the ducal castle at Leipzig, from late June to mid-July 1519, under the patronage of Duke George of Saxony and against the wishes of the local bishop of Merseburg. It grew out of a challenge by Johann Eck of Ingolstadt, who had criticized Luther's theses on indulgences and in late 1518 published theses for debate with Andreas Karlstadt of Wittenberg, aimed in fact at Luther.
In August 1588 Queen Elizabeth I came by river to the army camped at Tilbury, on the north bank of the Thames estuary in Essex, where troops under her lieutenant general, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, waited to resist a Spanish landing. The Armada sent by Philip II had already been driven up the Channel and scattered after the fighting off Gravelines, but no one in England yet knew that it would not return, and the Duke of Parma's army still stood ready in the Spanish Netherlands to cross.
A Model of Christian Charity is a lay sermon or discourse that John Winthrop composed in 1630 for the company of Puritan emigrants he was leading from England to Massachusetts Bay. The surviving heading says it was written in his passage across the Atlantic, and it has traditionally been pictured as preached aboard the flagship Arbella, though some historians think it was delivered before the fleet sailed or circulated in manuscript.
On 23 March 1775 the Second Virginia Convention, meeting in St. John's Church in Richmond to stay clear of the royal governor at Williamsburg, debated Patrick Henry's resolutions to put the colony into a posture of defense by forming and arming a militia. Several respected delegates had urged patience while petitions to the king were pending.
The Newburgh Address is the speech George Washington read to the officers of the Continental Army on 15 March 1783 in the Temple, a large log hall the soldiers had built at their winter cantonment near Newburgh, New York. The fighting had largely ended after Yorktown, and peace with Britain was close, but the officers had gone unpaid for months.
Thomas Jefferson delivered his First Inaugural Address on 4 March 1801 in the Senate chamber of the unfinished Capitol, the first presidential inauguration held in the new federal city of Washington. Chief Justice John Marshall administered the oath.
Robert Y. Hayne's speech on Foot's resolution is the South Carolina side of the Webster-Hayne debate, the most celebrated exchange in the history of the United States Senate. In December 1829 Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut proposed an inquiry into limiting the sale of public lands in the West.
Daniel Webster's Second Reply to Hayne was delivered in the United States Senate on 26 and 27 January 1830, during a debate that began with a modest resolution from Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut about limiting the sale of public lands in the West. Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina had turned the debate into an attack on New England, accusing it of selfishness toward the West and of disloyalty during the War of 1812, and had defended the doctrine, associated with Vice President John C. Calhoun, who was presiding, that a state may declare a federal law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
These three Senate speeches were the central statements in the long debate of 1850 over the lands won from Mexico, and the last great addresses of the three statesmen of their generation. The Mexican War had added California and the Southwest.
On the evening of 16 June 1858 the Illinois Republican state convention, meeting in the Hall of Representatives of the State House at Springfield, resolved that Abraham Lincoln was its first and only choice for the United States Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln answered with a carefully written acceptance speech that opened the campaign and set its terms.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates are the seven joint debates held between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic incumbent, during the 1858 contest for a United States Senate seat from Illinois. Senators were then chosen by the state legislature, so the two men were campaigning for legislative candidates of their parties.
The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate is the name later given to an unscheduled exchange on Saturday, 30 June 1860, at the Oxford meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, seven months after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was not a formal debate with set speeches and a motion, and no transcript was taken.
On 19 November 1863, four and a half months after the Union victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a large crowd gathered to dedicate the Soldiers' National Cemetery, where Union soldiers killed in the fighting of 1-3 July were being reinterred. The principal orator was Edward Everett, the former secretary of state and president of Harvard, who spoke for about two hours.
Abraham Lincoln took the oath for his second term on 4 March 1865 on the East Portico of the Capitol, under a newly finished dome, before a crowd standing in mud after a morning of rain. The war was nearly won: Sherman had marched through Georgia and the Carolinas, Grant held Lee at Petersburg, and Congress had sent the Thirteenth Amendment to the states five weeks earlier.
I Will Fight No More Forever is the message of surrender that Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce sent to General Oliver O. Howard and Colonel Nelson A. Miles on 5 October 1877, at the end of the siege at the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana Territory. Since June the non-treaty Nez Perce bands, some 750 people including many women, children, and elderly, had retreated more than a thousand miles from Idaho, through the Bitterroot Mountains, across Yellowstone, and north toward refuge in Canada, fighting a series of engagements with the army along the way.
On 18 September 1895 the Cotton States and International Exposition opened in Atlanta, a fair meant to display the industrial recovery of the South thirty years after the Civil War. Its organizers, who had included a Negro Building among the exhibits, invited Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute, to speak at the opening ceremonies.
On 23 April 1910 Theodore Roosevelt, a year out of the presidency and fresh from a long hunting expedition in East Africa, addressed a packed hall at the Sorbonne in Paris. He spoke as the citizen of one great republic to the citizens of another, and his subject was the character that self-government demands of ordinary people.
Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated on Saturday, 4 March 1933, at the low point of the Great Depression. About a quarter of the work force was unemployed, farm prices had collapsed, and in the weeks before the ceremony a wave of bank runs had led governors in most states to close or restrict their banks.
Lou Gehrig's farewell speech was delivered at Yankee Stadium on 4 July 1939, Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, between the games of a doubleheader against the Washington Senators. Two months earlier Gehrig, whose strength had been failing for a season, had taken himself out of the lineup in Detroit, ending his streak of 2,130 consecutive games.
Churchill gave this speech to the House of Commons on the afternoon of 18 June 1940 and read it again over BBC radio that evening. He had been prime minister for just over five weeks.
On 4 June 1940, less than four weeks after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons on the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. German armored columns had broken through the Ardennes in mid-May, driven to the Channel, and cut off British, French, and Belgian armies in a shrinking pocket on the coast.
On Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier aircraft struck the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, damaging or sinking all eight battleships in the harbor, destroying much of the aircraft on the island, and killing more than 2,400 Americans. That evening Roosevelt dictated a short draft to his secretary Grace Tully and then revised it by hand.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower's Order of the Day was the message issued by Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, to the soldiers, sailors, and airmen about to land in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Printed copies were handed to the men of the assault forces on the eve of the invasion, after a day's delay for bad weather, and Eisenhower also recorded it for broadcast.
John F. Kennedy took the oath of office from Chief Justice Earl Warren on the east front of the Capitol at noon on 20 January 1961, the morning after a heavy snowfall, in bitter cold. Robert Frost had just recited The Gift Outright from memory when glare kept him from reading the poem he had written for the day.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave this address on 28 August 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, near the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march, led by A. Philip Randolph and organized chiefly by Bayard Rustin, drew roughly a quarter of a million people to the Mall to press for civil rights legislation then before Congress and for economic opportunity.
On the morning of 28 January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven of its crew. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher chosen as the first Teacher in Space, and because of her, millions of schoolchildren were watching in their classrooms.
On 12 June 1987 President Ronald Reagan spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, with the Berlin Wall and the closed gate directly behind his platform. The city was marking its 750th anniversary, and Reagan, on his second visit, addressed Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, and a large crowd, while also speaking by broadcast to listeners in East Berlin and Eastern Europe.