A guide to the Statue of Liberty details the history of the monument and presents facts about the statue, its origins, and its influence.

The world's most famous sculpture, the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Enlightening the World, rises to a height of 305 feet from the base of her pedestal to the top of the golden flame of her torch. Conceived, designed, and originally built in France, she was unveiled on her new island home in 1886. The postcard trade, still in its infancy, embraced the icon, and Miss Liberty's commanding figure soon appeared on millions of postcards. In this book, one will see the statue from many angles--profiles, long shots, close-ups, aerials, torch views, and more.

The world s most famous sculpture, the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Enlightening the World, rises to a height of 305 feet from the base of her pedestal to the top of the golden flame of her torch. Conceived, designed, and originally built in France, she was unveiled on her new island home in 1886. The postcard trade, still in its infancy, embraced the icon, and Miss Liberty s commanding figure soon appeared on millions of postcards. In this book, one will see the statue from many angles profiles, long shots, close-ups, aerials, torch views, and more."

Presents a brief history of the Statue of Liberty and describes how France gave the statue to New York City to commemorate the realtionship between the two countries, the creation and erection of the statue, and how its meaning has changed.

For many Americans the Statue of Liberty was their first glimpse of the country they came to call home. The story of the Statue of Liberty is as fascinating as the country she represents. Learn how she came to be created and how she came to represent freedom for oppressed people around the world.

Conceived in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the grief that swept France over the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Statue of Liberty has been a potent symbol of the nation's highest ideals since it was unveiled in 1886. Dramatically situated on Bedloe's Island (now Liberty Island) in the harbor of New York City, the statue has served as a reminder for generations of immigrants of America's long tradition as an asylum for the poor and the persecuted. Although it is among the most famous sculptures in the world, the story of its creation is little known. In Enlightening the World, Yasmin Sabina Khan provides a fascinating new account of the design of the statue and the lives of the people who created it, along with the tumultuous events in France and the United States that influenced them. Khan's narrative begins on the battlefields of Gettysburg, where Lincoln framed the Civil War as a conflict testing whether a nation "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal... can long endure." People around the world agreed with Lincoln that this question—and the fate of the Union itself—affected the "whole family of man." Inspired by the Union's victory and stunned by Lincoln's death, Édouard-René Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a legal scholar and noted proponent of friendship between his native France and the United States, conceived of a monument to liberty and the exemplary form of government established by the young nation. For Laboulaye and all of France, the statue would be called La Liberté Éclairant le Monde—Liberty Enlightening the World. Following the statue's twenty-year journey from concept to construction, Khan reveals in brilliant detail the intersecting lives that led to the realization of Laboulaye's dream: the Marquis de Lafayette; Alexis de Tocqueville; the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, whose commitment to liberty and self-government was heightened by his experience of the Franco-Prussian War; the architect Richard Morris Hunt, the first American to study architecture at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; and the engineer Gustave Eiffel, who pushed the limits for large-scale metal construction. Also here are the contributions of such figures as Senators Charles Sumner and Carl Schurz, the artist John La Farge, the poet Emma Lazarus, and the publisher Joseph Pulitzer. While exploring the creation of the statue, Khan points to possible sources—several previously unexamined—for the design. She links the statue's crown of rays with Benjamin Franklin's image of the rising sun and makes a clear connection between the broken chain under Lady Liberty's foot and the abolition of slavery. Through the rich story of this remarkable national monument, Enlightening the World celebrates both a work of human accomplishment and the vitality of liberty.