The statue is of a robed woman woman holding a torch in her raised right hand and a tablet inscribed with "July IV MDCCLXXVI" Roman numerals for the United States Independence date of July 4, 1776.

The story of Lady Liberty starts in France when the politician and writer of a history of the United States, Edouard Rene de Laboulaye wanted to present a gift the the United States to mark the Centennial of the American Declaration of Independence and as a symbol of the qualities of the "republican" form of government that were being criticised by some French citizens that desired the return of a strong ruler like Napoleon. 

The statue is made of a sheathing of pure copper, hung on a framework of steel.

The choice of copper for the statue's outer construction was made by Eugine Viollet-le-Duc and he developed the the repousse technique where the malleable metal is hammered on the reverse side.

Maurice Koechlin, the chief engineer of Gustave Eiffel's company and the designer of the Eiffel Tower engineered the internal structure. The steel structure's construction was a prelude to skyscraper construction in New York City.

There are glass panels on the torch because the statue functioned as a lighthouse to guide ships on the Atlantic Ocean into New York Harbor from 1886 to 1902 and it's electric light could be seen for 24 miles (39 km) out to sea. It was the first lighthouse to use electricity.

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue.

The tourist's eye view

The Statue de la Liberte- La Liberte Eclairant le Monde (Liberty Enlightening the World) the gift from the people of France to the people of America to commemorate the Centennial of the signing of the United States "Declaration of Independence"  was intended to symbolise the US and France's representative forms of government, not immigration to the US.

In the decades after the American Civil War increasing immigration was causing social strife in America's cities as many of the immigrants refused to learn English and congregated in insulated communities with their own newspapers and schools that used the languages of their various "old countries" rather than adopting the language and customs of the United States.

The often quoted lines:  "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,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Are from the poem: The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, written in 1883 as a donation to the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" to raise money for the pedestal's construction. The New Colossus was not read at the opening of the statue in 1886.

The increasing controversy over languages other than English being used in schools in the most progressive state in the United States, Wisconsin, caused the Republican Governor, William D. Hoard, to ask the State Legislature to pass the "Bennet Law," the state's first compulsory school attendance law in 1989. It required all public schools to teach major subjects in English. This was during the period that free public schools were being established in the US

The "Bennett Law" was passed by the State Legislature in 1890 that sought to close down the foreign language elementary schools in the state and was supported by the Republican Governor, William D. Hoard.

In Illinois there was the "Edwards Law" with a similar goal as the notion that English was the language that created national unity in the United States and was a vital part of cultural progress.

In 1901, the poem's author, Emma Lazarus' (who had passed-away in 1887) friend Georgina Schuler began a campaign to memorialize Emma Lazarus and her poem, which succeeded in 1903 when a plaque bearing the text of the poem was mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

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