On April 15, PBS will air THE ADDRESS, a new film from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns.  The film tells the story of a tiny school in Putney, Vermont, the Greenwood School, where the students are encouraged to memorize, practice and recite The Gettysburg Address. In its exploration of the Greenwood School, the film also unlocks the history, context and importance of President Lincoln’s most memorable address.

The Greenwood School students, boys ages 11-17, face a range of complex learning challenges that make their personal, academic and social progress especially inspiring.  THE ADDRESS reveals how President Lincoln’s historic words motivate and engage these young men a century-and-a-half after Lincoln delivered a speech that would go on to embolden the Union cause with some of the most stirring words ever spoken.

Click on Pic Below to Watch Preview:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRj_3aKzl3c&list=UUUFrfvd3CeQnguMBHXhrjsw&feature=share&index=5

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary and in conjunction with the film, Burns and PBS launched LearnTheAddress.org, an initiative that invites people to upload videos of themselves reciting the Gettysburg Address to the project’s web site. To date, the site has accepted thousands of submissions from people across the country and includes videos of a wide-range of prominent Americans, including every living president!  I just watched the video recitations of Steven Speilberg, Stephen Colbert, Uma Thurman, Whoppi Goldberg, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Seinfield, Arianna Huffington, Martha Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel – and wow, this is powerful stuff.

Take advantage of this opportunity to be a part of history and record the address with your family, children or friends and submit your video to through this link: www.learntheaddress.org

The Address will premiere April 15, 2014 at 9:00 p.m. on PBS.

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863