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,
Edouard-Rene 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 Liberte Eclairant 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 Ecole 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."
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