Icons of Liberty

No object carries more of the country's meaning, and almost none of it was intended. The Pennsylvania Assembly ordered the bell in 1751 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of William Penn's Charter of Privileges, the colony's founding guarantee of religious liberty and representative government. The verse they chose for the waist, from Leviticus, was about that anniversary rather than any revolution: Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof. The second meaning came later, and from other hands.