Liberty Bell

In September 1777, with the British army about to take Philadelphia, the State House bell was taken down and carted out of the city before it could be melted into cannon. It spent the occupation hidden under the floor of Zion Reformed Church in Allentown and came home the next year.

A century later it went traveling again. Between 1885 and 1915 the bell rode special trains to expositions in New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities, and crowds met it at stations along the way. Its last trip, to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, took it across the country and back.

Since then it has stayed in Philadelphia, close to the hall where it once hung, silenced by its crack.

This picture draws the bell in lines of light on black, like a blueprint switched on. The yoke and shoulder glow cool blue and violet, warming to orange at the lip and the clapper. Faint contour lines wrap the metal. The crack climbs from the lip and curls up beneath four stars.