Seventy Years Later, Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’ Yields Insights
Historians have called it one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in English, and surely one of the greatest ever delivered by an Englishman, at a moment of national peril unparalleled in modern times.
Seventy years ago, on June 18, 1940, Winston Churchill, barely six weeks in office as Britain’s prime minister and confronted with the threat of invasion from Nazi-occupied France, rose in the House of Commons and, in 36 minutes of soaring oratory, sought to rally his countrymen with what has gone down in history as his “finest hour” speech…
What the Churchill College documents reveal, perhaps surprisingly for those accustomed to the confident sweep of Churchill’s oratory, is the last-minute reworking that he applied to his speech, adding phrases here, rewriting others and adding yet others on the fly as he delivered the speech.
Jefferson changed ‘subjects’ to ‘citizens’ in Declaration of Independence
“Subjects.”
That’s what Thomas Jefferson first wrote in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence to describe the people of the 13 colonies.
But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it. Many words were crossed out and replaced in the draft, but only one was obliterated. Over the smudge, Jefferson then wrote the word “citizens.”
Scholars of the revolution have long speculated about the “citizens” smear — wondering whether the erased word was “patriots” or “residents” — but now the Library of Congress has determined that the change was far more dramatic…
“Seldom can we re-create a moment in history in such a dramatic and living way,” Library of Congress preservation director Dianne van der Reyden said at Friday’s announcement of the discovery.
“It’s almost like we can see him write ‘subjects’ and then quickly decide that’s not what he wanted to say at all, that he didn’t even want a record of it,” she said. “Really, it sends chills down the spine.”
David Livingstone letter deciphered at last
The contents of a long-illegible letter written by famed 19th century explorer David Livingstone have finally been deciphered, a British university said Friday, nearly 140 years after he wrote of his despair at ever leaving Africa alive.
Researchers say that the letter — which required state of the art imaging techniques to decipher — helps round out the picture of a man traditionally cast as an intrepid Victorian hero, revealing the self-doubt that tormented the missionary-explorer in one of his darkest hours…
Back home, Livingstone’s supporters were going mad with worry. No one had heard from him in years, and as Livingstone recovered, search parties set out into the interior to discover his fate. He was eventually located near the eastern shore of the massive Lake Tanganyika by journalist Henry Morton Stanley, whose memorable quip, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” immortalized their encounter.
Great read sometime the best and worst ideas are erased.
The History channel this weekend has a marathon of specials on The Revolution for those who need to bone up on their history.
I don’t want to give Jefferson all the credit for the final doc. He was the sole draftsman, but the drafting Committe of Five also included John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Ben Franklin to a lesser degree. Jefferson held the pen (and did write the draft very quickly, Adams’s said “in a day or two”) but even he admitted that he was not offering up anything that had not been discussed during the previous two years. In 1823 he told Madison that he, “did not consider it part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”
Then Jefferson’s draft was edited by the the Committe of the Whole (the Second Continental Congress)
See Pauline Maier’s “Amercian Scripture” Chp. 3, “Mr Jeffeson and His Editors”