Compare And Contrast Gettysburg Address And Victory Speech

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Danny Reiter English 101 Michelle Bush March 16, 2012 America has encountered many hardships throughout history, but the reason our country has triumphed and moved forward is because someone has been there to unite us with words of promise. Out of the many famous historical speeches, the two significant speeches that stand out are Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Barack Obama’s Victory Speech. Due to the significance of these particular speeches, William Safire in his “A Spirit Reborn,” and James Wood in his “Victory Speech,” analyze these works and write essays about their effects. Both writers note the moving aspects of these speeches that make them so powerful. Arguably, Safire and Wood’s essays are more different…show more content…
Even though they’re two completely different speakers and presidents, they have common beliefs. In Safire’s “A Spirit Reborn,” he approaches the unifying themes of the Gettysburg Address differently than Wood’s about Obama’s speech. Instead of focusing on the foundation of the overall speech bringing the nation together, William Safire concentrates on one key word, dedicate. He uses his writing to introduce how Lincoln used the word “dedicate” to bring the separated nation back to a whole. He writes how Lincoln utilized “Those five pillars of dedication rested on a fundament of religious metaphor” in order to create “a speech rooted in the theme of national resurrection” (42). Safire uses the word dedication to tie Lincoln’s whole speech together and show people, in clarity, how Lincoln is dedicating not only Gettysburg, but the whole nation to the people. This addresses the unification in
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