Chatterbox: In This Month's Issue

Old Cricket Says

How about a little vexillology? That’s just the technical word for the study of flag history and lore. Take our United States flag, for example. It has changed a lot over the past couple of hundred years. Stars and stripes? Not at first. The “Continental Colors” of 1776 had no stars and showed the British flag in its “canton” (the upper corner next to the staff). After the Declaration of Independence, the British emblem was dropped. On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress resolved that “the Flag of the united states be 13 stripes alternate red and white and the Union be 13 stars white in a blue field representing a new constellation.”

The flag gained two more stripes a few years later, then soon went back to 13. The pattern of stars varied from a circle to a square to all grouped into one big star. As new states joined the Union, more stars were added and continually rearranged.

Who actually designed our flag to begin with? The best known account tells how, in June 1776, General George Washington and a committee of patriots visited a young Philadelphia seamstress, Betsy Ross, and asked her to stitch up a flag according to their sketch. However, Francis Hopkinson, an artist, musician, writer, lawyer, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, later claimed he was the one who designed the flag.

Who knows? My guess is they all contributed. Could be. Part of the word history is story. In a story, everything’s possible.

How will you celebrate the Fourth of July?