In this lesson plan, students will learn how to annotate historical speeches for deeper understanding.
Students will learn to annotate a historical speech (Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses) to identify and articulate the author’s point of view, purpose, historical context and intended audience. Activity will culminate in an AP Short Answer Comparison question on the two speeches.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.9
Analyze seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.6
Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness or beauty of the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.2
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
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| Cathryn R. Goble-Smith, Davenport, FL | AP History | Two Class Period's |
In this lesson, students will use Lincoln's First Inaugural Address to learn how to annotate and analysis as a class.
In this lesson, students will use Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address to learn how to annotate and analysis as a class.
(~45 Minutes)
Material and resources you will need to complete this lesson.
To assess for understanding, students will use the historical thinking skills developed in the close reading of these two speeches and their knowledge of historical evidence to answer the following AP U.S. History Short Answer Question.
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend” it.
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
~ Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came…
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
~ Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address March 4, 1865
Using the excerpts, briefly explain (1), (2), and (3)
