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[00:00.00]喜欢hxen.com，就把hxen.com复制到QQ个人资料中！Five Famous Symbols of American Culture
[00:-1.00]1  The Statue of Liberty
[00:-2.00]2  In the mid-1870s,
[00:-3.00]French artist Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was working
[00:-4.00]on an enormous project called Liberty Enlightening the World,
[00:-5.00]a monument celebrating US independence and the France-America alliance.
[00:-6.00]At the same time,
[00:-7.00]he was in love with a woman whom he had met in Canada.
[00:-8.00]His mother could not approve of her son's
[00:-9.00]affection for a woman she had never met,
[00:10.00]but Bartholdi went ahead and married his love in 1876.
[00:11.00]3  That same year Bartholdi had assembled the statue's right arm and torch,
[00:12.00]and displayed them in Philadelphia.
[00:13.00]It is said that he had used his wife's arm as the model,
[00:14.00]but felt her face was too beautiful for the statue.
[00:15.00]He needed someone whose face represented suffering yet strength,
[00:16.00]someone more severe than beautful. He chose his mother.
[00:17.00]4  The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on
[00:18.00]an island in Upper New York Bay in 1886.
[00:19.00]It had his mother's face and his wife's body,
[00:20.00]but Bartholdi called it "my daughter, Liberty".
[00:21.00]5  Barbie
[00:22.00]6  Before all the different types of Barbie dolls for sale now,
[00:23.00]there was just a single Barbie.
[00:24.00]Actually, her name was Barbara.
[00:25.00]7  Barbara Handler was the daughter fo Elliot and Ruth Handler,
[00:26.00]co-founders of the Mattel Toy Company.
[00:27.00]Ruth came up with the idea for Barbie
[00:28.00]after watching her daughter play with paper dolls.
[00:29.00]The three-dimen-sional model for Barbie was
[00:30.00]a German doll - a joke gift for adults described as having
[00:31.00]the appearance of "a woman who sold sex".
[00:32.00]Mattel refashioned the doll into a decent,
[00:33.00]all-American-although with an exaggerated breast size - version
[00:34.00]and named it after Barbara,
[00:35.00]who was then a teenager.
[00:36.00]8  Since her introduction in 1959,
[00:37.00]Barbie has become the universally recognized Queen of the Dolls.
[00:38.00]Mattel says the average American girl owns ten Barbie dolls,
[00:39.00]and two are sold somewhere in the world every second.
[00:40.00]9  Now more than sixty years old,
[00:41.00]Barbara - who declines interviews but is said to have loved the doll
[00:42.00] - may be the most famous unknown figure on the planet.
[00:43.00]10  Barbie's boyfriend,
[00:44.00]Ken, was introduced in 1961 and named after Barbara's brother.
[00:45.00]The real Ken, who died in 1994,
[00:46.00]was disgusted by the doll that made his family famous.
[00:47.00]"I don't want my children to play with it," he said in 1993.
[00:48.00]11  American Gothic
[00:49.00]12  Grant Wood instantly rose to fame in 1930
[00:50.00]with his painting American Gothic,
[00:51.00]an often-copied interpretation of the solemn pride of American farmers.
[00:52.00]The painting shows a serious-looking man
[00:53.00]and a woman standing in front of a farmhouse.
[00:54.00]He was strongly influenced by medieval artists
[00:55.00]and inspired by the Gothic window of an old farmhouse,
[00:56.00]but the faces in his composition were what captured the world's attention.
[00:57.00]13  Wood liked to paint faces he knew well.
[00:58.00]For the grave farmer he used his dentist,
[00:59.00]a sour-looking man. For the woman standing alongside him,
[-1:00.00]the artist choose his sister, Nan.
[-1:-1.00]He stretched the models' necks a bit,
[-1:-2.00]but there was no doubt who posed for the portrait.
[-1:-3.00]14  Nan later remarked that the fame she gained
[-1:-4.00]form American Gothic saved her from a very boring life.
[-1:-5.00]15  The Buffalo Nickel
[-1:-6.00]16  Today, American coins honor prominent figures of the US government
[-1:-7.00]—mostly famous former presidents.
[-1:-8.00]But the Buffalo nickel,
[-1:-9.00]produced from 1913 to 1938,
[-1:10.00]honored a pair of connected tragedies
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