Opening paragraphs..............................

Even severed as it was from the rest of the body, the hand was majestic.  Sixteen feet tall, with long, tapered fingers holding aloft a twenty-nine foot torch, it sat on the banks of a small lake in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876.  It was all that existed of the Statue of Liberty, and it had been shipped in pieces from France for the Untied States' Centennial Exhibition, a world's fair celebrating the country's first one hundred years.  Ten years later, the complete figure, rising more than a hundred and fifty feet from its pedestal and with a bright skin of copper, would be installed  in New York Harbor to the awe and admiration of the world.  But in 1876, the Statue of Liberty, like the young country in which it would be given, was still a work in progress.  A symbol of promise, perhaps, but not yet of triumph.
-Candice Millard,  Destiny of the Republic:  A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President