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Cooper Union

Lincoln’s oration at New York’s Cooper Union showed that the prairie lawyer could play in the big leagues

On the frigid and stormy evening of February 27, 1860, so the newspapers reported, Abraham Lincoln climbed onto the stage of the cavernous Great Hall of New York’s newest college, Cooper Union, faced a room overflowing with people, and delivered the most important speech of his life.

A student of the speech that changed Lincoln’s career visits the place where he gave it

How a mass killing 150 years ago made today’s New York a better place

The children are back at Columbine High School now— if they can still truly be called children after the terrible violence perpetrated upon them. We can only hope that the murder of twelve of their classmates was a random moment of madness.

In a day of rampant money-making, gentle Peter Cooper was not only a reformer but successful, widely loved, and rich.

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