Visitors will have the opportunity to view the earliest known draft of the Gettysburg address and participate in a live interactive crowdsourcing challenge of Lincoln’s manuscripts
The event will begin with an introduction by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. She will be followed by historian and manuscript specialist Michelle Krowl, who will talk about Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address. A portion of this program will be livestreamed at Youtube.com/LibraryofCongress and Facebook.com/LibraryofCongress. Lincoln county schools across the country and the general public are invited to virtually participate via the livestream and our new crowdsourcing website at crowd.loc.gov.
The Gettysburg Address is considered one of Lincoln’s most prominent speeches. Lincoln had been invited to give a "few appropriate remarks" during a ceremony to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Library holds two original drafts of the Gettysburg Address that reveal the ways in which Abraham Lincoln prepared his now-famous comments.
These drafts are part of the Abraham Lincoln Collection. The papers of the lawyer, representative from Illinois and 16th president of the United States, contain approximately 40,550 documents dating from 1774 to 1948. Roughly half of the collection, more than 20,000 documents, comprising 62,000 images, as well as transcriptions of approximately 10,000 documents, is available online. Between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. visitors will engage with the primary sources of this collection and decipher Lincoln’s handwriting using the crowd.loc.gov website.
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