Harry Houdini

Boston, MA

Harry Houdini — born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest in 1874 — was the most famous magician and escape artist of his age and for years the national president of the Society of American Magicians. Among his most sensational publicity stunts were manacled leaps from bridges into cold rivers, from which he freed himself underwater as crowds held their breath; he performed one such escape here in the spring of 1908.

Boston, MA

Around AD 1000, five centuries before Columbus, Norse seafarers sailing out of Iceland and Greenland reached the shores of North America — a landfall remembered in the Icelandic sagas as "Vinland." Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red, became the figure most associated with that voyage of discovery. This bronze, raised on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall in the late 19th century, grew out of a New England enthusiasm for the idea that Vikings, not later explorers, first crossed the Atlantic to the continent.

Boston, MA

This Lombard Lamp was presented to the people of Boston in 1980 to mark the city's 350th anniversary, a gift from the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Germany. Modeled on the ornate lamps that once lit Hamburg's streets, it was offered as a gesture of international friendship and a salute to Boston's long heritage of freedom. It stands as a token of the enduring ties between the two historic port cities.

Boston, MA

These four lines are among the most famous in Hungarian literature — the poet Sándor Petőfi's ringing pledge that liberty outweighs even love, and that he would give both for his country. Petőfi was the voice of Hungary's 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule, a young writer who turned verse into a rallying cry and, by tradition, vanished in battle at just twenty-six. Monuments bearing his words stand far beyond Hungary, raised by Hungarian communities who carried his poetry with them across the ocean.