Lincoln, for instance. I don't get it. People don't do this anymore.

more important, how did people pay attention?

I imagine before people had distractions like shopping, "The Bachelor," TMZ, and other such important stuff, they paid more attention to what was going on with their government.

also makin sure the black men werent lookin at no white women

That Gettysburg Address was a whopper...two, three minutes, even.

He had to get home in time for "SURVIVOR: Andersonville".

The Gettysburg Address is the exception, not the rule.

like how did they not lose their voice, or lose their place (assuming they had notes), etc?

My class is 85 minutes long, I teach four of them a day right now, and with 33 kids in the room half deafened by ear buds, I usually have to be pretty loud to be heard.

they do 3-4 hour speeches now, its just 84% clapping

clearly, you should've been an old lawmaker

source?

dkfan

you really don't get how people could passionately try and work out laws for the benefit of society. seems like its more worthwhile than debating non-points on the existence of god.

i'm just making the point, that its hard to imagine people talking about laws for 2-3 hours. when that's very well what they should be doing. I have days where i'm working 14 hour shifts and don't eat. i don't think its very hard to do. lawmakers debating laws for 2-3 hours should be commonplace and take no stretch of the imagination. if they spend their lives making laws, 2-3 hours is nothing. there should be absolutely nothing unimaginable about it.

Uh, the point was that Lincoln and some other lawmakers and speakers of yesteryear use to give 2 or 3 hour speeches, and that this is rather uncommon today. Why, I do not know, or begin understand.

Not to mention that considering roughly 75 percent of Americans believe in the active Christian God -- a belief that surely influences American law and society -- debating the existence of God seems somewhat worthwhile.

Surely you've had professors that can lecture for 2-3 hours with no problem?

Surely. But a large part of my full-time job is to have leading intellectuals give talks to the public. I've never seen a talk go over an hour or so, and at that point people usually start itching in their seats. I wonder if it's just attention span, though, or something(s) else. Like, for instance, a leading thinker doesn't NEED to speak to a group in NYC for 2-3 hours now because of new media and ease of travel, which allows ideas to be more easily dispersed to wider audiences more often.