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Historic Speeches

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Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation by President Franklin Roosevelt Digital History ID 4302
In this speech, President Roosevelt asks Congress to declare war on Japan.
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The Four Freedoms by President Franklin Roosevelt Digital History ID 4303
This speech, also known as the Four Freedoms speech, was given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the 1941 State of the Union Address. Roosevelt enumerated four points as fundamental freedoms humans "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy: 1. Freedom of speech and expression 2. Freedom of every person to worship in his own way 3. Freedom from want 4. Freedom from fear According to Wikipedia, his inclusion of the last two freedoms "went beyond the traditional American Constitutional values protected by the First Amendment, and endorsed a right to economic security and an internationalist view of foreign policy that have come to be central tenets of modern American liberalism."
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Engines of Our Ingenuity

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Hedy Lamarr, Inventor Digital History ID 4489
I began my movie-going in the heyday of the old star system. Movie stars had set up housekeeping in the American mind. The men were all strong, handsome, and soft-spoken -- with pomade on their hair. The women were stunningly beautiful. These were man-made people -- icons without counterparts in reality.
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Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer Digital History ID 4498
We tend to view the computer as having come into being only during the past 30 years. No doubt, it has come into its own during that period. But serious attempts to do complicated machine calculations were under way well before WW-II. The most important pre-war effort was started in the 1920s by Vannevar Bush. It culminated in 1942 with the dedication of his huge Rockefeller Differential Analyzer at MIT -- a one-hundred-ton machine with 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 motors.
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