Stuff You Should Know - The Gettysburg Address: Short and Sweet

Episode Date: July 14, 2016

The Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches in political history, despite only being a few hundred words long. What was so special about this commemoration? We'll give you the skinny right here and now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know,

podcast. NPR edition? No. Bob Ross edition. Oh, man. There's a documentary out about him. Yeah, I haven't seen it, but I will for sure. Oh, speaking up.

Can't wait. I saw Bloodsport for the first time in my life the other week. The movie? Yes. Have you seen it? No. Oh, Chuck.

I mean, I saw parts of it, but it's in my bag. I love every second of that movie. It was so great. They basically made a movie to show that Jean-Claude Van Damme can do crazy splits. They made a movie for that. Yeah, the only version I would watch of that would be the Rift Tracks version.

You don't even need Rift Tracks. Yeah, but they make everything better. Sure, of course they do. But I would love to see a Rift Tracks Bloodsport. I'm just saying, it's a pretty great movie worth seeing. The bad guy in it is just terrifying, because he's so clearly insane. Oh, really?

And dangerous. Yeah, this guy is operating on a level no one else in the movie, including surprisingly Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds is operating on. He's in it? Yeah. Wow.

He's the trusty sidekick. Wow. Yeah. What happened to Jean-Claude? He's still around. I think he's all over Twitter. Well, that doesn't surprise me. I think a couple times a day he tweets like,

hey, it's me, Jean-Claude Van Damme. Remember? Yeah. Well, he had that big commercial that was out not too long ago. I didn't see that one. Maybe he did a split between two trucks or something, like with one leg on each truck,

like driving down the road, if I remember correctly. Oh, he's reading his Kindle? Is it a Kindle ad? I think so. And I think, I didn't see him, but he's got to be in one of those dumb, what are the movies with all the people with Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis and Dolphin?

The Last Temptation of Christ. Yeah, yeah, he's in one of those movies. Oh, Red. No. The Expendables. Yes, he's got to be in one of those, right? Probably. He would literally be the only person

of that elk in those movies. I hope he is. Yeah, me too. I saw Red the other day for the first time, too. That's pretty entertaining, wasn't it? Yeah, I haven't seen those either. All right, some stuff, just, you know, yeah. Let's get serious, Chuck.

All right. Yeah, okay, are you ready? Well, we talked about Jean-Claude Van Damme, and that can only mean one thing. Gettysburg Address. Right, that's right, man. Well, let's talk about it. Here's a better question.

OK. You saw Lincoln, didn't you? I did. I didn't. Oh, you didn't? I know enough to know why we're talking like this, though. Supposedly, that is an accurate depiction of Abraham Lincoln's speaking voice.

Yeah, I read this article in The Atlantic. It was one of those things where the guy who's writing the book like writes a long draft of the book but in article form. Yeah. And they publish it. And the words that remade America is the name of the article and the book by a guy named Gary Wills.

And he says, like, yeah, Abraham Lincoln was a tenor. Yeah. Who had a voice that you could very easily describe as shrill. Yeah. I remember when I saw the first trailer for the Lincoln movie. I think like most people, like, the internet kind of blew up the next day with, like, what is going on with Daniel Day-Lewis? Hey, guys, I'm Abraham Lincoln.

So you did not see it? Not yet. I intend to. You know, here was my deal. I thought it was quite dull. And I went into it expecting a bit more of a profile on Abraham Lincoln's life. Isn't it more like about a two-week period or something?

It's really about trying to get the emancipation proclamation. No. It's trying to get the vote passed. I just can't remember the exact amendment or whatever. That shows how much I was checked out. The 13th? 14th? It was a very, very in-depth look at the process of passing

like legislation. I see. It was kind of dull. Then that's just me. I was like, where's all the action? Yeah. Where's that shootout that Abraham Lincoln had? Yeah.

I want to run around with a sword free in slaves. I think that's Abraham Lincoln vampire hunter that you'd like. I probably should have seen that one instead. But I mean, Daniel Day Lewis is great. It was just a little dull for my taste. I see. So I'm in the minority. But this was just sliding on an old suit then,

reading this article, right? Like you're familiar with all this? An old, boring suit. A little bit. And I want to be a Civil War buff. I keep trying to work myself into it. Like reading. I got a book given to me, one of those big, huge books.

They all are. And I just can't quite crack it. Have you tried World War II? Maybe that's more of your fancy. No, I just need to buff it up. I see. Civil War buff. Because I do recreate stuff?

No, although I did just see, I did a hike at Sweetwater Creek State Park this weekend. And they were, I didn't know it was a deal. I was walking down the wooded path. And there was a camp with a bunch of Union soldiers. And they're ladies in authentic garb, sitting around the campfire. And I was like, what's going on?

Because it wasn't a big reenactment, like a big battle thing. It was just a Saturday night. I don't know, man. They looked like they were just camping in period costume. Maybe they had practice that day. Maybe. That's weird.

I thought it was interesting they were Union soldiers too. Did they pretend you were a time traveler? They did. I showed them my iPhone. They were like, what? Devil's magic is there. I did. Anyway, it was just weird.

Well, let's talk about, let me ask you this. I have another question. Did you have to memorize the Gettysburg Address? Because this article on the site basically says that all students had to. And I don't know that that's now. I don't know anybody who had to memorize the Gettysburg Address. Now, we had to remember a part of Caesar's address

for English class. I come to Barry Caesar not to praise him, blah, blah, blah. The whole deal. Friends, Romans, countrymen. Sure. I memorized that in high school. Did you have to or did you just do it on your own? I was just bored.

I was playing basketball one day. I decided to stop. I'm trying to think what I had to memorize. No, I had to memorize that, which now that I'm older, I think that is like, what a terrible way to teach. It is. Like, memorize these words only. They'll have no meaning for you whatsoever.

They weren't taught what the thing meant, really. It was just like, recite this. I had to remember. I had to memorize the song Surrey with the Fringe on top for a transportation play in sixth grade. Really? Chicks and geese and. Chicks and ducks and geese, better scurry.

When I take you out in the Surrey. When I take you out in the Surrey with the Fringe on top. Very nice. I was not expecting that in this episode. We're always over here just snickering. Just because we haven't started yet. All right, so the Gettysburg Address is a surprisingly small document.

That's one of the reasons why apparently school children have to memorize it, because it's just short. But it would not be hyperbolic to say that it changed the tone of American politics forever from this very short speech that Abraham Lincoln gave on the Gettysburg battlefield when it was being dedicated as a national cemetery. Yeah, so let's talk a bit about the background.

What was going on that day in November was like you said, we're gonna open up this brand new national cemetery, Pennsylvania, where so many people died at the Battle of Gettysburg. Yeah, and a lot of them died. Yeah, from July 1st to July 3rd, 1863, Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army butted heads with the Army of the Potomac.

I think there were soldiers from like Ohio, New York, a couple of other states. It was a lot of troops under George Meade, General George Meade. It was a new general at the time. Southwest of Harrisburg. Yeah, it was like one of the, it might've been the first battle fought in the North.

Yeah, there weren't a lot of Northern battles. No. Do you ever read the Confederate markers here in Atlanta? Here they are. They're all over the place. Yeah, like it's kind of weird sometimes like to drive a mile for my house and see like, well, this is where so-and-so pushed back

an army of a thousand, like right where this playground is. It's just very strange. They're all over, like every 10 feet, there's one down here. Yeah, but like you said, not a lot of battles up North. This was the, this was one of the key battles that really swung the tide in favor of the North and it was the bloodiest,

one of the bloodiest affairs in American history for sure. Maybe human history. Really? I'm sure it was up there. It was probably beaten by some World War II battles for sure, but this was probably still up there with one of them. Yeah, I did. I think the Civil War had the highest casualties

of any war or it was the first, it went, the Civil War took place. It had more casualties than all of their preceding wars put together, some nuts so statistic like that. I'm really curious what the trajectory of the country would have been had that not happened, especially the South. The Civil War?

Yeah. It probably would have just been two different countries. You think? It would have been, I mean the South was just like, we're succeeding and the North has said, no, you're not. And had the North just been like, all right, good luck. It would have just been two different countries.

Well, I think I mean, go back even further and what if there was no, what if it was just a unified country from the beginning? Like what would the American South be like? If they never would have been like, you know, we're seeding, what if it was truly a United States? I don't know because when you ask that question,

you're asking like, would, could the issue of slavery, this huge device of issue that was, that people really felt strongly on either side? And in the center too, there were pretty strong feelings. Like could it have been resolved in any other way besides war? I don't know.

Yeah, that's a great question. I'll bet there's historians out there who've tried to figure it out. Well, it always cracks me up too when you hear people in the South still say like, it was about states rights. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, states rights to own slaves.

Exactly. Or they call it the war of Northern aggression. Yeah. I mean, there was obviously more to it than slavery, but that, you're fooling yourself if you don't think that was the key driving component. Definitely was. Anyway, so Robert E. Lee goes up

against the army of the Potomac. There were, and of course the range is estimated, but 23,000 dead Union casualties. Which is a quarter of the Union army. One quarter. Not just the people who were fighting in Gettysburg, the whole Union army. A quarter of them died.

28,000 Confederates. Which is a third of the Confederate army. Incredible. And this is over, I did some calculations. I did two. It's over three days. That is every five seconds someone dying. But that's if the battle raged for every second.

Every 72 straight hours. Yeah, which obviously it didn't. No, but every five seconds somebody died. Isn't that crazy? 700 men per hour. And then the first two days, 35,000 died in the first two days. So that was like the bloodiest two days

of any American conflict, if I'm not mistaken. So it was a big deal. And it was not just a big deal in the number of casualties. It was a big deal in the fact that the North won this battle, that it was a Northern battle. Because up to this point the Confederacy had been beating the North pretty badly. As far as if you were looking at it as a battle by battle,

if you're just taking number of battles won. The South was winning the Civil War at the time. And Abraham Lincoln was fairly determined to use this occasion to help reinvigorate support for the war in the North. Yeah, so Lee loses, retreats to Virginia on July 4th. And he tried to resign because of it.

Yeah, he tried to. And Jefferson Davis said, no, thank you. I got nobody better than you. Yeah. He was not pursued, which was Lincoln didn't like that. And other Northern generals did not like the fact that Meade didn't put the pedal to the metal at that point. Yeah, because he could have ended the war conceivably.

Had he taken out Lee's army, the rest of it, or captured him? Like that would have been the end of the Civil War right there. Yeah, true. And this guy's sitting there getting his nails done and lolly gagging. So in the days following the Battle of Gettysburg, the Union soldiers were quickly buried, the ones that were immediately dead.

And poorly marked poppers graves, basically, or maybe not poppers graves, but not what they deserved as servers. They were temporary graves. They were battlefield graves. And so this man named David Wills, he was an attorney in the area, said, you know what, Meade, to do this right.

And he spearheaded the effort of the National Cemetery with the Gettysburg Cemetery Commission. It was the first Kickstarter back in 1863. So he said, you know what, there's this guy, Eddie Everett. You know him as Edward. He's sort of a rock star speaker. Yeah, big time. Former Secretary of State, former Senator,

President of Harvard College. This dude brings the house down. Let's get him in here, because this guy can go for like two hours straight without notes. Without notes? Yeah. And just like the most flowery prose. And he remembered every word of it.

Two hour long speeches that were just amazing speeches that held crowds and raps. And he had no notes in front of him. Yeah, and so they agreed to delay it a little bit so he could be booked, because I guess he had another engagement. No, he said, this is great, but I need more than a month to prepare a two hour speech.

He wanted to do research. It was so soon after the war, or after the battle, that they dedicated it as a cemetery that the official accounts, or even non-official accounts, hadn't really started to emerge yet. So he actually had to do his own interviews with people who were there to gather the information he needed to do a great speech on it.

Well, yeah, because a large part of his speech was like in our article, they said it was sort of like watching a TV. Like Dateline, or 48 hours. Yeah, he had to recap the battle for everyone, because Twitter was down, and no one knew what was going on. And he actually, he had cred as a battlefield orator. He'd give him speeches at Bunker Hill and Concord.

And actually, when this guy came to town and spoke at your battlefield, your battlefield was world famous for that moment on. That's how big a deal Edward Everett was. Yeah, in fact, he was so big of a deal. They waited, like we said, because he wasn't ready, and then said, oh, and let's also invite President Lincoln. Right.

So speak for a couple of minutes. And apparently, that was, Lincoln took no offense to it. That was totally normal. Yeah, sure. At the time. It was like a ceremonial thing. It was. And this was being conducted by the state of Pennsylvania.

So at the time, you didn't really expect much federal involvement or support, but they're like, no, this is a big enough deal. We want to invite the executive branch. That is correct, sir. Oh, you want to take a break real quick? Yeah, let's do it. OK.

Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say.

Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you shouldn't know. All right, so Chuck, Lincoln actually was scheduled to leave at 6 AM the morning of the dedication ceremony, right?

Yes. And he'd get into town on the same day as the show. Yeah, like noon. Yes. Which was plenty of time. Something we don't even like to do when we have our shows. No, it's cutting a little close. Yeah.

But it can be done. And he's the president. And he's got a war to conduct. So no one expected him to come in early. Lincoln actually overrode that schedule and said, no, I'm going in the day before. This is important. I don't want to miss it all together

because this is a town of 2,500. And they're expecting 15,000 people to come to this dedication ceremony. Get me there early. Right. So he left the day before. Yeah. And he was put up at that lawyer's house.

Willis, I can't remember his first name, or Will's. Is he the same Willes who wrote the thing? No, he said no relation. He's also not like a vampire. Right. He's still alive. He wrote the first day in the count. No relation.

It is me. Right. But he spends the night at that lawyer's house. And there is like, this town is just packed. But the fact that Lincoln wanted to do this badly enough that he went early shows that this meant something to him. Yeah. And 15,000 people for back then.

That's a large crowd. Sure. And I wondered how in the world, who hears this thing? The first 50 feet of people? That was apparently another advantage of Lincoln's real voice is that he could project it really far. Yeah, but not to 15,000. Come on.

I don't know. I would imagine that they had better hearing back then because they had to and because they had fewer artificial devices that were damaging their hearing probably. I think with everything, I just totally made that up. It extends it a few more feet. But I imagine 10,000 of those 15 were just partying.

What do you say? Or maybe it's like a Monty Python skit and they're relaying it back and it changes each time. Like an Occupy Wall Street thing. Yeah. So he gets there today before. And he was quite right. There were plenty of dignitaries that

were supposed to be there that waited to leave that morning. And they missed the whole thing because they were just late. So the day of the thing, the dedication, Everett gives his speech and it brings the house down. It's exactly what everybody expects. Yeah, and the guy who wrote this article pointed out that I would have been bored to tears for a two hour speech.

But apparently at the time, that was like entertainment. People were crazy for the stuff. Yeah. The longer the better. Yeah, she said that they had a much longer attention span because they hadn't been corrupted by television. Yeah, that's a bit of a leap, but sure. It makes sense, though.

Yeah. Remember Short Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central? I do. That was great. Indeed. So Lincoln gives his speech and a lot of hay has been made over the last century or almost well, century and a half of the difference in length

between Lincoln's statement, Lincoln's address, and Everett's address. But there's really no point in comparing him in that sense. No one expected Lincoln to speak for a very long time. They expected him to dedicate the thing with some short remarks and that Everett was going to give a two hour speech. So this didn't surprise anybody at the time.

It just seems like in retrospect, when you compare the two and the power and the everlastingness of the two speeches, that it's like, wow, he did this in only two minutes wherever it took two hours. Yeah. But like you said, two different things. Yeah.

But it's a myth that it was like people were like, I can't believe that was so short. That's all they were expecting. Yeah. Agreed. And in fact, it was so short. Here's a nice little tidbit, I thought. The official photographer for the event,

it takes a minute to get things set up when you're taking pictures back then. You're not just snapping away. And he took these pictures of Everett and was getting ready to take pictures of Lincoln and then got everything set and Lincoln is walking off with a mic drop, basically. That may be a myth as well.

I think it's a great story. It is a fantastic story. There's a ton of great stories out here. Like he wrote the thing on the back of an envelope on the train ride there. Supposedly not true. No. Because he was very well known as a,

he was a practiced orator, is a lawyer to start out with. He apparently poured over his speeches. Sure. So the fact that he went a day early to this and he decided he wanted to use this occasion to help drum up support for the war, he almost certainly wrote at least a draft in Washington before he left. Yeah, that's what they think is that he wrote most of it,

if not all of it, and then continued to work on it on the train. But I don't think there was ever an envelope involved. No. Correct? I don't think so. He had his traveling secretary or his full-time secretary with him.

John Hay. Yeah, John Hay ran it by him, I guess. Yeah. He was like, bravo, boss. Bravo. You're wonderful. Another great one. And he went, thank you.

They sipped their tea in stony silence for the rest of the train ride. They had a weird relationship. So should we read this thing? Oh, also, this is where that whole thing was like, was Abraham Lincoln gay? He shared a bed with a man. I have never heard that.

Oh, yeah, there was a very well-read biography that came out years back, within the 2000s sometime, on Abraham Lincoln, really popular. And in it, the biographer's talking about how, I think, at the Gettysburg address, he shared a bed with a man. And one of the reasons why, well, the reason why, was because the town was so packed.

The town was so packed that even the president of the United States had to share a bed with somebody, because there was just nowhere else for people to be. The guy who designed the cemetery had to sleep sitting up in somebody's front room in a chair that night, the night before the dedication, because the town was so packed with the girls. But there was this whole like, was Abraham Lincoln gay?

Was it an entire book? Not about him being gay. Oh, OK. It was mentioned in that people read the book and then started talking about whether he was gay. Because my book would say, was President Lincoln gay? And you would open it up and it would say, who cares? The end.

It would be like, why did they print 1,000 blank pages after that? Civil War book. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be four inches thick. And they make great door stops. Should we read this thing in full? Yeah, with a little music, maybe something patriotic.

Yeah, I think we should split it in half, though, as we do with our Halloween readings. Should we? What are we going with your Yackety Sacks? I think we use that in our party. Otanenbaum? Oh, Otanenbaum would be good. All right, well, we'll see.

This is Jerry's choice. Jerry, surprise us. Do you want to start or finish? I will start, because I have a feeling you're going to do better than me. Is that better to finish then? OK, go ahead. Four score.

No, that's not right. Just kidding, sorry. 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 battlefield 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 this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate. We cannot hollow this ground.

The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. That was wonderful. It was OK. All right, I'm going to bring it home. Should I do it in high pitch now? That's why I figured I should go first. Bring in the helium.

Here we go. 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. Boom, Abe out, and he dropped his mic.

It really is. The modern description of this speech is that it's a mic drop. Yeah, 272, 273 depends on what version you're looking at. Words, under two minutes is all he needed. Under two minutes, and he was even interrupted with applause five times. Oh, really? And it still only took two minutes.

And when he said this, Chuck, when he gave this speech, it was totally in contrast with the way politicians are any orator at the time spoke. Yeah. The two-hour spiel that Everett gave? Yeah, a lot of raw, raw stuff. That was the standard stuff. Floury language, lots of lofty rhetoric.

Well, admonishing the Confederacy. Yeah. Admonishing, is that the right word? Sure. Yeah, just a really kind of a rabble-rousing type of thing. But the idea that a politician would get up and give a plain spoken speech was new as of the moment Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address.

The guy, the author Gary Wills, the historian, not the lawyer who set the whole thing up, allegedly, not the same guy. He points out that Everett gave his speech at the last moment in history when it was customary to give a speech like that. Oh, wow. Because Abraham Lincoln got on stage right after that and changed it forever in the opposite direction. And they say that he changed American speech for not just

like speaking, not just oration, but also writing. That Mark Twain's modern novel, Huckleberry Finn, the first modern novel, followed in the footsteps of the Gettysburg address, or the way of speaking and talking that Lincoln laid down in the Gettysburg address. Like he just changed everything. Wow. Yeah.

All right, well, let's take another break. Because I have to reflect on that. You just laid down some heavy stuff. And we'll finish up after this. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you shouldn't know.

Speech changer. What? That's what you said. It was a speech changer. And it was amazing. And whoever wrote our article, who was that? Tiffany Connor. Oh, Tiffany Connor.

She's great. She points out that it was a time when they were starting to send messages via telegraph. So that also tied in, and that people were trying to get to the point a little quicker, I think, because of the telegraph. You start talking, somebody just snap your fingers, like, come on, out with it.

Like you're sending a telegraph, and you're like, gentlemen on this day, and they're like, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know what day it is. I need to go to the bathroom is what I'm trying to say. So they were just striving for a more concise language, and I think Lincoln really put a cat, he dotted the i. Maybe even crossed the t as well. Yeah, and said, this is the better way to talk.

And it sounds even a little flowery to us, but we should have read parts of Everett's speech. That's where we failed. We failed pretty badly. All right, so what else was different about it? It was a pretty radical idea at the time to, because what he kind of did with his speech, well, not what he kind of did, what he very much did was say,

let's take a big picture view of this thing. And they point out he doesn't talk about slavery or the Confederate army or the Union army. He talks about things in very broad terms and basically says, you know what? The Declaration of Independence was the bomb. That was the deal, the real deal. And the Constitution is the means

by which we serve that document. Because at the time, there were Southerners going, well, slavery is not even in the Constitution. It was very much, if not, that the Constitution was the guiding document of the United States government. Then at least no one was saying the Declaration of Independence was. Lincoln was basically saying with this speech,

he was reframing it. He was saying, no, it's the Declaration of Independence laid out the ideals. The Constitution is just the vehicle you use to get to those ideals. And let's all remember that in the Declaration of Independence, it talks about all men being created equal. And in today's modern world, we're

just going to substitute men with humans. Yeah, and even at the time, it was obviously people weren't so far along that Lincoln was like, and slaves should be completely equal to us starting today. It was even a process for the North to bring about equality over time. But just the notion that we deserve, everyone is born and deserves equality was a radical idea at the time.

And so it's really worth, as I was researching this, I had to go back and reread the address a couple of times. And once I did it, it really started to sink in. Yeah, me too. Finally now, in almost my 40th year on this planet, I can understand the Gettysburg Address. You should not be teaching this to schoolchildren. It's totally meaningless to them.

Yeah, or break it down sentence by sentence and really explain it. Sure, OK, now if you have like, you know, the dead poet society teacher or a captain, my captain. Who was the guy that Matthew Perry played Ron somebody? Chandler Bing. Chandler Bing was a different role. This is a teacher, like a really inspirational teacher.

Oh, really? Something, yeah. Now you're thinking of Edward James almost. That was the Milagro-Beamfield War. No, stay in the liver. No, that was LaBamba. Oh, man, we got off track. What was my point?

That Matthew Perry was the best friend. Oh, that, like, this doesn't mean anything to schoolchildren. But one of the reasons why is not because it's above their heads, because this is the way we see America now. But the reason we see America and America government and the idea that it's by the people of the people, for the people, and that people are created equal in that is that ideals of the founding fathers were laid out

on the Declaration of Independence. And that's the true guiding document. The reason we see these things is because of the Gettysburg Address. In these 272-ish words, he changed the way that all Americans from that point forward saw America. And as a matter of fact, again, Gary Wills points out that prior to the Gettysburg Address, people referred to the United States in the plural form.

Like, the United States are a great place to visit. Like, the collection of states. Yes, yeah. And afterward, it became single and unified. And a singular noun, the United States, is a great place to visit. That came after the Gettysburg Address. Except for these states.

Right. Steer clear of these. I had a great Shakespeare teacher in college that, man, I wish I could remember his name because I would shout him out. But he, you know, Shakespeare's tough for most people. He literally, every day in class, we would sit down. I think we went through, like, three plays a year or a quarter in one class.

And we would just read the thing. And he would stop about every 30 seconds and say, here's what that means. Here's what he's saying. And we would go, oh, that's what that means. Then we would read the next section. Someone would read it. He'd go, here's what that means.

He's really saying, and he would really put it in, like, terms college kids can understand. Like, you know, when your friend does this and blah, that's what's happening here with Horatio. And it was just like, it blew my mind, because we all left with complete full understanding of, like, three plays at a time. That's so neat.

And would scramble to, like, sign up for his Shakespeare 2 class, because he was so awesome. And I don't know, it seems like such an effective way to teach when you're talking about these old languages. You can sit around and read Chaucer all day. But unless someone's explaining, like, what it means, because these stories are wonderful, amazing stories. Well, Chaucer, in particular, too.

Yeah, but if you don't get it, it's not hitting home. You've got to, like, liken it to something that they identify with. Yeah, or basically completely master old or middle English. Yeah, well, who wants to do that? Right. That's neat, man. I wish you could remember the guy's name.

Is it Mr. Ames? No. Mr. Barr? I think it was Dr. Carr. Dr. Bing. That's OK. So these days, the Gettysburg Address, there are a few different versions of it.

There are at least five, they believe, versions. And I think two of them now, actually written down versions, are at the Library of Congress. Are they on display? They're probably on display, right? Sure. Or you can just be like, let me see one of the Gettysburg Addresses, and they'll run off and get it.

You just got to put a 50 in their front pocket. So you can actually look at these, and they're mostly the same, except for just some little revisions here and there that he made. I guess post-drafts. Post-drafts. Yeah. Yeah.

Because he knew the document would live on. Sure. And if they had drafts, this confused me for a second, but I had to wrap my head around it. If he had drafts before, then it would have proven unequivocally that he had written it before he was on the train. But the fact that that myth is still around is because there's no fact to counterbalance it.

So that means that all the drafts came after. There were copies that he made. Right. That I imagine his secretary wrote down himself. I think he gave him some to him. But yeah, I'm sure John Hay was responsible for it. But John Hay had one that is in the Library of Congress, right? Yeah, but it's funny that you don't think about like,

I need like four copies of this. So start writing. You know, get out the pen. And would it kill you to draw some rabbits doing some weird things in the margins? So what about the reaction? I think there's been a lot of disagreement, depending on who you talk to.

Some people say in the moment at the place, it wasn't super well received. But other people are saying like, nah, that's a myth. Yeah, apparently it's another big myth that especially he walked off and was like, man, they really hated that. I blew it. Yeah.

He knew that it did exactly what he wanted it to. Yeah. He wanted to drop the mic, and he did. And supposedly the crowd was pretty happy with it. People are like, why did he drop that corn cob on his way up to stage? Why was he talking into it the whole time? It's so weird.

And why did it amplify his voice? That was the most surprising part. Well, who cares if they liked it or not at the time? We love it now. Yeah, go crazy over it. Sure. Clearly, we've been like breathlessly talking about how great the Gettysburg Address is this whole time.

We haven't even entertained the other side that it sucked. You know what else we didn't do was the very thing we said it would be a great way to teach people. We should have read it, and after every few sentences, broken down what it meant. That's not our job. All right, we're going to do all the work. Do you want to?

No. OK. Well, we'll let the teachers do it. Yeah, I encourage this should be in classrooms. Did we say anything really bad in this one? Yeah, this is a teaching aid. Watch this. Turn record over now.

Bing. Remember that? Oh, yeah. OK. If you want to know more about the Gettysburg Address, ask your teacher, and you can also go on to our great website, howstuffworks.com, and type in Gettysburg Address. No H at the end.

We're not in Scotland. Nope. And since I said Scotland, it's time for a listener mail. By the way, quickly, after the other day talking about the rules on sushi, I went and watched it again like three times. Yeah, I still haven't seen it. Did you watch Bag Boy that that one listener

moved in about? No, I still didn't see that one. I looked it up. I have it sitting on a Google search. I haven't had time to give any attention to it, maybe in the fall. I remember what it was specifically about it that really killed me was that he says, Sushi. Said it was sushi. And he intros saying, like, we have a chef here

to make some delicious sushi sandwiches, sushi sandwiches. I love that guy. All right, this is from, I know you remember Kathleen of Cooper Cats, the PR agency. Oh, yeah, our former PR agency. Yes, many years ago, we've farmed out our PR to this great company in New York, Cooper Cats. And Kathleen worked there, still does.

And she was awesome and super nice. And she wrote this in about something she's working on this year to her heart, which I think is pretty important. Hey, guys. And she had some nice things to say early on. Lowry Redrick, like Edward Everett. Just catching up with this, but I won't bore you with that.

Hey, guys. It wasn't boring to us, by the way. I just don't want to, you know. Hey, guys, I was writing because of one of our clients nowadays is Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. They're the oldest and largest private cancer center in the US. And we're beginning a big public awareness slash press push around misconceptions and misperceptions

and myths about clinical trials that people have about them. While this is for a client, it's really important to me. I've learned a lot of things. One, only 4% of patients participate in clinical trials. 4%. Wow. It's alarmingly low. Even though they're the root of every current and future

advance in treatment, people have negative impressions of clinical trials. And that changes as soon as they learn more about them. Other things I learned through my work with MSK, things I learned about my work with Memorial Sloan Kettering I had no idea about before the trials. They are not just for last resort clinical trials. Many of the best treatments are offered early in treatment

through clinical trial participation. Clinical trials are much more targeted today through genetic screening, tumor testing, and precision medicine. Doctors have a much better grasp of what works and what will not. Almost no clinical trials for cancer involve placebos, though most people are concerned about this. Yeah, like I want the drug.

Yeah. PS. Yeah, exactly. And cost is a huge concern for people thinking about and rolling. And yet almost all out-of-pocket costs for treatment are covered. So that is from Kathleen. Yeah.

She makes some good points there, Chuck. She does. I never really thought about it. I think we just got PR'd. I think we did. PS, if you happen to need a good cry, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and I do not, by the way, Kathleen, they just wrapped up a two-week partnership

with Humans of New York. You ever go to that website? Man, they're great. It's an incredible photo documentary of the world of pediatric cancer. Oh, jeez. So many of the miracles documented were results of clinical trials, which

is why I'm so passionate about pushing this information. And Kathleen just had her second little BB. Oh, congratulations. And important stuff. So look into clinical trials, and maybe we should do a show on them one day. We definitely should. I really am surprised that we haven't already.

Have we not? I know we did one on human experimentation, but we probably talked more about the sorted side of it, like the bit of the section and stuff. The gruesome. Oh, yeah, we did. And we talked about the regulations on people who are human guinea pigs.

Why should we all do one on clinical trials? Yeah, so that's awesome, Kathleen. It's cool when you can do work that you can PR with a good feeling, and we're sorry about our PR episode. I'm not. I stand by that. No, I think it's a great episode, but it probably should have been called

The Legend of Edward Bernays, and less, this is what PR is like. It was fun episode, wasn't it? It surely was. If you want to know more about us, you can hang out with us on Twitter, at S-Y-S-K Podcast. Same goes for Instagram, where you can see pictures of our pets and stuff like that.

You can also hang out with us on Facebook at facebook.com. So that's what we should know. And you can send us emails to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. Lastly, hang out with us at our home on the web, our playhouse, for the internet, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.