by Tenebris

Created on: June 15, 2008

"Resolved, that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation."
- the Second Continental Congress, 1777

While the Stars and Stripes has proudly been flown over the soil of the United States of America ever since George Washington requested it to be made by Betsy Ross, it was not until the twentieth century that a formal day has been set aside to celebrate the flag. Flag Day was first formally established by then-president Woodrow Wilson in 1916; and was signed into federal law by then-president Harry S. Truman on August 3, 1949. Today, Flag Day is celebrated every year on June 14, the date upon which the Second Continental Congress formally adopted the new design.

Although legend has it that the Stars and Stripes was first created in 1776, it is first known to have flown over the headquarters of the Continental Army on January 1 of the following year; and even then it was not yet official. It took another six months before the Second Continental Congress formally proposed to replace the Grand Union flag, essentially the same as the modern flag but bearing a Union Jack in the canton instead of the star field and another hundred years before the Stars and Stripes was flown again from a government building, in honour of the nation's centennial year.

It was perhaps unfortunate that the first call for a day to honour the Stars and Stripes happened to come in 1861, just prior to the outbreak of civil war. The motion died stillborn, to lie mostly quiescent for another three decades until the reunited nation had had a chance to heal.

It was in the early years of the nation's second century that the drive to create Flag Day truly began, sown in the schools of the nation. In 1885, Bernard Cigrand, a Wisconsin school teacher and one of many across the country who had initiated 'flag birthday' events for his students, began actively advocating for a national Flag Day. Along with Leroy Van Horn, he became the first head of the American Flag Day Association, giving over two thousand speeches in the cause. During the same period of time, another teacher, George Bolch, initiated a June 14 celebration of the national flag for the school children of New York City.

The combination of public lobbying and private sentiment had its effect. In 1893, at the urging of Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin and President of the Society of the Colonial

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