Abraham Lincoln, 16th President and Author of the Gettysburg Address

As part of the pre-production on his next film, "The Address", which airs this spring on PBS, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns discovered that The Greenwood School in Putney, Vermont, uses the text of Lincoln's most famous oration as part of its curriculum.  The learning-differentiated youth at Greenwood are encouraged to memorize, practice, and recite the address as part of their therapeutic regimen for dyslexia, attention difficulties such as ADD and ADHD, and executive functioning deficits.  The school empowers these young men with the skills and strategies necessary to bridge the gap between their outstanding promise and present abilities, and the results they were getting using the Gettysburg Address were striking enough to become the centerpiece of the film and motivate a push to have everyone in the U.S. to record their own version of the speech.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the address in 2013, Burns (along with numerous partners such as Bank of America, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and WETA) created a national organization, Learn The Address, to engage every American possible and reflect upon those powerful words which resonate still in our communal heart.  They built a website and put the word out for citizens from every corner of our nation to post their recitations of it. The response was remarkable - thousands of citizens have responded to the appeal.   

Rock Stars, Nobel Laureates, plus a lot of just plain folks like us have uploaded to the site and their contributions may be easily viewed.  There's a great two-minute mash-up on the opening page of the website (which can be found at www.learntheaddress.org) that features a group diverse enough to include everyone from Bill Gates to Martha Stewart, plus every living American President, reciting the moving words our sixteenth President made immortal.

If you're reading this on your laptop or home computer there's a good chance you have the capability to join them. Just use the built-in camera and microphone on your computer to record yourself reciting (or reading) the Gettysburg Address. 

Go to the website www.learntheaddress.org and follow the instructions under the tab at the top of the page labeled "Share Your Gettysburg Address" to upload your recording to the website, and join the multitudes who have added their voice.