Statue of Liberty

A giant statue on an island in the harbor of New York City ; it depicts a woman representing liberty, raising a torch in her right hand and holding a tablet in her left. At its base is inscribed a poem by Emma Lazarus that contains the lines “ Give me your tired, your poor , / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Frederic Bartholdi, a Frenchman, was the sculptor. France gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States in the nineteenth century; it was shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in sections and reassembled. The statue was overhauled and strengthened in the 1980s.