Honor and Oblivion

The American Story

Christopher Flannery

Society & Culture, Documentary, History

4.6 • 941 Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2021

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Only devoted students of history have heard of him, but in the years leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, John Dickinson, next to Benjamin Franklin, was probably the most famous American. He was renowned as a champion of American rights and liberty. His writings during this period did more than any others to defend and define the American Cause. But one decision would cast Dickinson from fame into obscurity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the American Story.
0:04.0	Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.
0:07.0	Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.
0:12.0	This is Chris Flannery with the Clermont Institute.
0:15.0	I call this one,
0:17.0	honor and oblivion.
0:20.0	The love of fame, wrote Alexander Hamilton, is the ruling passion of the noblest minds.
0:27.0	But especially in the noblest minds, passion bows politely to reason.
0:35.0	And the love of fame is tempered, by love of the true and the good.
0:40.0	Fame is the height of honor on the grandest scale, and the noblest minds will want to be honored
0:46.8	only for what is most worthy of honor.
0:50.7	They don't seek the applause of fickle opinion here and now, but the respect of the wise and good of all times and places.
0:58.0	Ultimately, they want to be measured by what is worthy in the eyes of God.
1:05.4	What is most worthy of honor deserves to be remembered.
1:09.4	Old men forget, as Shakespeare's King Henry V proclaims at Agincourt.
1:15.0	Yet all shall be forgot, before oblivion shrouds in darkness the most worthy deeds.
1:22.4	These will be remembered from this day to the ending of the world.
1:27.0	No human deed in the whole course of human events
1:32.0	surpasses the American Revolution.
1:35.0	Bringing forth a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition
1:40.0	that all men are created equal. Rightly will the names of those happy few, that band of brothers,
1:47.0	Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Adams.
	...

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