Keeping It Current

Flag Day

June 14

Bernard J. Cigrand was a teacher who lived more than 100 years ago. He loved the American flag. He put it on his desk, where the children in his class could see it. He asked them to write about how the flag made them feel.

Cigrand and others wanted to have a national holiday to honor our flag. They worked for this idea for many years. At last, in 1949, the government made the holiday they wanted. June 14 became Flag Day.

You can see the flag in many places. Some people hang the flag on a flagpole. This is called flying the flag. People fly flags at home and at work. The flag flies at your school, too.

Sometimes, the flag flies halfway up the flagpole. This happens when someone important to our country has died. Flying the flag this way shows respect for the person.

Background Information
The design of the United States Flag has changed over the years. On early flags, the number of both stars and stripes showed the number of states in the country.

Eventually, the nation grew to include too many states to show with stripes. If a stripe was added each time that a state joined the Union, the flag would look very different from its original design. The Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that would become our National Anthem in 1814, was the only flag to have more than 13 stripes. It had 15 stripes, one stripe for each state in the Union at that time.

In 1818, Congress decided to go back to have 13 stripes to represent the original colonies, and to add a new star to the “constellation” for each state admitted to the Union. The last change to the flag occurred on July 4, 1960, when the fiftieth star was added to represent the state of Hawaii.