Joanna, my wife, once promised our grandchildren that she would give $20 to each of them who learnt Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by heart. Most did. Almost all of them learnt at least the first two sentences. Those two sentences are important, for they help explain, then and now, why we think of our country as a Nation of Documents and not a Nation of a Single Tribe.
我的妻子乔安娜(Joanna)曾向我们的孙辈承诺，凡是能把亚伯拉罕•林肯(Abraham Lincoln)的《葛底斯堡演说》全文背下来的，每人就给20美元。大多数孙辈都做到了，几乎所有人至少记住了前两句。这两句话非常重要，因为它们在当时和今天都帮助解释了，为什么我们认为自己的国家是一个“文献立国”的国家，而不是一个由单一部族构成的国家。
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