used his wife's arm as the model, but felt her face was too beautiful for the statue. He needed someone whose face represented suffering yet strength, someone more severe than beautiful. He chose his mother.
The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on an island in Upper New York Bay in 1886. It had his mother's face and his wife's body, but Bartholdi called it \ Barbie
Before all the different types of Barbie dolls for sale now, there was just a single Barbie. Actually, her name was Barbara. Barbara Handler was the daughter of Elliot and Ruth Handler, co-founders of the Mattel Toy Company. Ruth came up with the idea for Barbie after watching her
daughter play with paper dolls. The three-dimensional model for Barbie was a German doll — a joke gift for adults described as having the appearance of \sex\a decent, all-American — although with an exaggerated breast size — version and named it after Barbara, who was then a teenager.
Since her introduction in 1959, Barbie has become the universally recognized Queen of the Dolls. Mattel says the average American girl owns ten Barbie dolls, and two are sold somewhere in the world every second.
Now more than sixty years old, Barbara — who declines interviews but is said to have loved the doll -
may be the most famous unknown figure on the planet. Barbie's boyfriend, Ken, was introduced in 1961 and named after Barbara's brother. The real Ken, who died in 1994, was disgusted by the doll that made his family famous. \want my children to play with it,\said in 1993.
American Gothic
Grant Wood instantly rose to fame in 1930 with his painting American Gothic, an often-copied
interpretation of the solemn pride of American farmers. The painting shows a serious-looking man and a woman standing in front of a farmhouse. He was strongly influenced by medieval artists and inspired by the Gothic window of an old farmhouse, but the faces in his
composition were what captured the world's attention.
Wood liked to paint faces he knew well. For the grave farmer he used his dentist, a sour-looking man. For the woman standing alongside him, the artist chose his sister, Nan. He stretched the models' necks a bit, but there was no doubt who posed for the portrait. Nan later remarked that the fame she gained from American Gothic saved her from a very boring life.
The Buffalo Nickel
Today, American coins honor prominent figures of the US
government — mostly famous former presidents. But the Buffalo nickel, produced from 1913 to 1938, honored a pair of connected
tragedies from the settlement of the American frontier — the destruction of the buffalo herds and the American Indians.
While white people had previously been used as models for most American coins, famed artist James Earle Fraser went against tradition by using three actual American Indians as models for his creation. For the buffalo on the other side, since buffalo no longer wandered about the great grasslands, Fraser was forced to sketch an aging buffalo from New York City's Central Park Zoo. Two years later, in 1915, this animal was sold for $100 and killed for meat, a hide, and a wall decoration made from its horns.
Uncle Sam
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