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, June 14, 1777

While the Stars and Stripes has been proudly 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.

Even though it sometimes feels like one, Flag Day is not a national holiday. It is, however, a state holiday in Pennsylvania.

Twenty-eight separate versions of the national flag have been raised over American soil (not counting Confederate variants). Flag Day specifically commemorates the adoption of the second version, the first ever to make use of the stars and stripes. Before then, the newly born United States used the Grand Union flag, essentially the same as the modern flag but bearing a Union Jack in the canton instead of the star field.

The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, four hundred years after the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.

The only formally recognised symbolism in the Stars and Stripes is that of the thirteen original states each being recognised by one of the stripes, while every state of the Union is represented by a star. While the three colours have no formal symbolic meaning, George Washington is traditionally said to have taken "the stars from Heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing Liberty." Blue is also sometimes interpreted as the representation of Liberty in another tricolour flag of the 1770s, that of revolutionary France, in which white is also said to represent Equality (though in that case, it is the white that came most clearly from the previous governmental structure). France was also the first nation to recognise the new flag of the United States.

Curiously, the ratio of the United States flag (as decreed by Executive Order 10834) is not absolutely

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