1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system
Federal News Network presents a daily update of important moments in the history of the U.S. government.
In a ceremony held in Paris on this day in 1884, the completed Statue of Liberty was formally presented to the U.S. ambassador as a commemoration of the friendship between France and the United States. The idea was born in 1865, when the French historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed a monument to commemorate the upcoming centennial of U.S. independence in 1876, the perseverance of American democracy and the liberation of the nation’s slaves. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi came up with sketches of a giant figure of a robed woman holding a torch, possibly based on a statue he had previously proposed for the opening of the Suez Canal. He travelled to the U.S. to drum up fundraising, which also had help from publisher Joseph Pulitzer and Emma Lazurus’ poem, which was inscribed on the statue’s pedestal. From Paris it was disassembled and eventually rebuilt on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor in 1886.
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