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        The Statue of Liberty is probably the ______ icon of the USA.

       ( ...) When the American Civil war ended, Édouard de Laboulaye wanted to commemorate the end of the slave trade with a gift. He and other people who opposed slavery raised money and hired a sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, to design the Statue. Bartholdi later employed the French engineer, Gustave Eiffel, to devise its structure.

        Eiffel designed the Statue to be built around a massive metal skeleton, similar to the Eiffel Tower. In 2018, a map dealer bought some historic papers at an auction in Paris, which included original plans. After special treatment, the papers clearly showed that Eiffel’s plans had been changed by Bartholdi.

       (...) We don’t know what Eiffel thought of Bartholdi’s changes. By then, Eiffel was working on other projects, and only his assistants were working with Bartholdi.

      (...) At first, visitors could climb a ladder to the torch in Liberty’s arm, but in 1916, there was an explosion on a nearby island. It damaged the Statue and made it unsafe, and the stairway to the torch has been closed ever since. During restoration work in the 1980s, engineers noticed that the structure inside Liberty’s head, shoulders, and arm were different from how they were shown on Eiffel’s plans. They thought that the builders had made mistakes, but some historians believed that Bartholdi had changed Eiffel’s design. The newly discovered papers confirm those theories.