“One of the first meanings had to do with abolition, but it’s a meaning that didn’t stick,” Edward Berenson, a history professor at New York University and author of the book “ The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story,” said in an interview with The Washington Post. The plaque with the famous Emma Lazarus poem wasn’t added until 1903. Ellis Island, the inspection station through which million of immigrants passed, didn’t open until six years after the statue was unveiled in 1886. It also revives an aspect of the statue’s long-forgotten history: Lady Liberty was originally designed to celebrate the end of slavery, not the arrival of immigrants. The new Statue of Liberty Museum in New York Harbor boasts a number of treasures: the original torch, which was replaced in the 1980s an unoxidized (read: not green) copper replica of Lady Liberty’s face and recordings of immigrants describing the sight of the 305-foot monument.
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