On July 22, ...

... 1849, Emma Lazarus (right) was born in New York City to Moses Lazarus, a sugar refiner, and Esther Cardozo Lazarus. The trilingual poet's accomplishments merited a New York Times obituary upon her death in 1887. Curiously, the article omitted mention of the work for which she is now best known, "The New Colossus," a sonnet inscribed at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Among its famous lines:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

... 1943, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) was born in Galveston, Texas.

On July 4, ...

...1954, the BBC reported: "Housewives celebrate end of rationing." That day, 12 years' enforced scarcity of staples, begun during World War II, came to a close. The headline prompts a wee tribute to my late mother-in-law, Margaret Mary Kerlin O'Neill, a legend for her skill in stowing foodstuffs in her undergarments in order to get them across the Irish border and home to Derry City, then, as now, under British rule. Butter is said to have posed particular difficulties. (photo courtesy of the BBC)
... 1884, the 108th anniversary of the proclamation in Philadelphia of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, a statue named "Liberty Enlightening the World" was formally presented to a U.S. diplomat at a ceremony in Paris. A contemporary account described this Statue of Liberty as a "great artistic monument, the gift of France, to which have contribut­ed by their votes 180 cities, forty general councils, a large number of chambers of commerce and of societies, and over a hundred thousand subscribers."

On May 19, ...

... 1921, as the Statue of Liberty neared its 35th birthday, Congress passed an Emergency Quota Act, putting a halt to the massive immigration of the previous century. The Act and its successor, the Immigration Act of 1924, by limiting new arrivals to a small percentage of those of the same nationality already in the United States, nearly shut the door to immigrants from anywhere other than northern and western Europe. Today immigration remains a contested issue, as our colleagues at ImmigrationProf Blog have been detailing, a compromise bill announced Thursday already garnering is much criticism.
... 2002 (five years ago today), East Timor, which had been under the supervision of the United Nations since acquiring independence in 1999 from Indonesia, which had ruled it with an iron hand for the prior quarter-century. In an election last Sunday, the tiny country (fewer than 1 million people, occupying 1/2 of the island of Timor, itself about the size of Netherlands) put Nobel Peace Prizewinner José Ramos-Horta on track to become its new President.