Proclaim Liberty

The words are from Leviticus 25:10 — "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" — and the Pennsylvania Assembly ordered them cast onto a bell for the State House in Philadelphia in 1751. The bell came from the Whitechapel foundry in London and cracked the first time it was rung.

Two Philadelphia founders, John Pass and John Stow, melted it down and recast it twice in 1753. It hung in the State House tower through the Revolution and, by tradition, rang on July 8, 1776, for the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Nobody called it the Liberty Bell until the 1830s, when abolitionists took the inscription for their own. The crack that silenced it opened in 1846, on Washington's Birthday, and has never been repaired.

The bell hangs from its yoke in a single solid navy, the bands around the shoulder and lip picked out in white, the famous crack drawn as a jagged white line from the lip toward the crown. The inscription is split around it in spaced red capitals: "PROCLAIM LIBERTY" above, "LAND" set huge below, the smaller lines tucked between. The letter-spacing is wide enough to slow the reader down. The eye lands on the crack, reads up, then reads down.