Today in History

The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor on June 19, 1885. The monument was a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States, intended to commemorate the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence, some ten years earlier. Sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi's Liberty Enlightening the World stands more than 300 feet high, and has come to symbolize freedom and democracy to the nation and to the world.

The statue is constructed of copper sheets which are assembled on a framework of steel supports designed by Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. For transit to America, the figure was disassembled into 350 pieces and packed in 214 crates. Four months later, it was reassembled on Bedloe's Island (renamed Liberty Island in 1956). On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty before thousands of spectators. Since the 1892 opening of nearby Ellis Island Immigration Station, Bartholdi's Liberty has welcomed more than 12,000,000 immigrants to America. Emma Lazarus's famous lines engraved on the statue's pedestal are linked to our conception of the statue Americans call "Lady Liberty:"

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me

Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," 1883.

• Twelve years after the statue's installation, Thomas Edison's motion picture company filmed the Statue of Liberty. This film is available online through Life of a City: New York, 1898-1906. Browse the list of film titles to find other views of the city at the turn of the century.
• By World War I, the Statue of Liberty was firmly established as an American icon. Search Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920 on Statue of Liberty to examine sheet music illustrated with images of Lady Liberty. See, for example, "Good-Bye Broadway, Hello France" published in 1917.

  Search on the term Bartholdi in the collection The Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals to find articles concerning the "Bartholdi Colossus." Read, for example, a brief article entitled "The Inauguration of Bartholdi's Liberty Statue" which the journal Manufacturer and Builder carried in its November 1886 issue.

• The American Memory collections include many pictures of the landmark. To find them, search across the collections of Photos & Prints on Statue of Liberty.