Sandwiched between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, Flag Day isn't officially a federal holiday but its history goes back more than a century.
They called for 13 red and white stripes and the same number of stars,"white on a blue field, representing a new constellation." Today Americans wave a 50-star flag but the stripes remain untouched, pointing back to the colonists who rebelled against the British crown. Before the Declaration of Independence, each colony flew its own flag.
The flag has been an inescapable symbol of that unity at critical moments in American history, beginning in the War of 1812 whensaw it flying, in tatters, over Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor. The fort had endured a night-long British onslaught that Key watched helplessly from a ship carrying a truce mission.
"To get that flag up there, America's fighting men had to die on that island and on other islands and off the shores and in the air," Rosenthal would write in 1955."What difference does it make who took the picture? I took it, but the Marines took Iwo Jima."
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