June 14 · This Day in America
The country is barely a year old and losing more battles than it wins, but it pauses to decide what it will look like. On this day the Continental Congress passes the Flag Resolution: "That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." Read that last phrase again. Not a coat of arms, not a crown, not a lion — a constellation. A new arrangement in the sky, as if these quarreling colonies were placing themselves among permanent things. Stars would be added as states joined, the field always able to hold one more. More than a century later, in 1916, President Wilson proclaims June 14 as Flag Day; Congress makes it law in 1949. The cloth changes. The idea — room for one more — does not.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1877
Born enslaved in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1856, Henry Ossian Flipper endures four years of near-total silence from fellow cadets — and on this day becomes the first African American to graduate from the United States Military Academy, taking his diploma from General William T. Sherman. He goes on to command Buffalo Soldiers and survey the frontier. The Army would wrong him; in 1999 a president would right it with a pardon. The diploma was already his.
Source: www.nps.gov
“Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”Continental Congress, 1777