Americans Held Hostage by Iran - Gainesville, FL
N 29° 39.127 W 082° 19.387
17R E 371939 N 3280969
A memorial garden created in honor of the Americans held hostage by Iran is located in the City Hall plaza in Gainesville, Florida, USA.
Waymark Code: WMQ16X
Location: Florida, United States
Date Posted: 11/27/2015
Views: 3
A memorial plaque in the garden reads:
This Garden was Dedicated
by the Citizens of Gainesville
on October 20, 1980
to the Americans Held
Hostage by Iran
November 4, 1979
"On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. The immediate cause of this action was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow Iran’s deposed Shah, a pro-Western autocrat who had been expelled from his country some months before, to come to the United States for cancer treatment. However, the hostage-taking was about more than the Shah’s medical care: it was a dramatic way for the student revolutionaries to declare a break with Iran’s past and an end to American interference in its affairs. It was also a way to raise the intra- and international profile of the revolution’s leader, the anti-American cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The students set their hostages free on January 21, 1981, 444 days after the crisis began and just hours after President Ronald Reagan delivered his inaugural address. Many historians believe that hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter a second term as president."
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