“On the site of the war’s bloodiest battle, Lincoln arrived at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863 for a dedication ceremony of a battlefield memorial. In his famously brief address, Lincoln began by implicitly changing the birth date of the country: not with the birth of the Constitution in 1787, but “four score and seven years ago”–the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In this way, the nation wasn’t conceived in a charter of compromise … but rather was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

—The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It by Corey Brettschneider