USA history in the usa can be a holiday of honor and national pride, every day to figuratively” rally round the flag.” Flag Day has its origins within the Second Continental Congress. On June 14, 1777, the Congress adopted a flag design, specified as “That the flag of the usa be thirteen stripes, alternate white and red; that the union be thirteen stars, white inside a blue field, representing a new Constellation.”
The original utilization of this design would have been to function as the flag carried into battle (the brand new War was still well arrived). The flag was initially carried within the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777. In these early days of the usa flag, it turned out shown on naval ships and eventually became accepted and honored by the new Usa citizens by foreign nationals also. In 1778 Captain Paul Jones commanded the naval warship “the Ranger” on which the flag was placed. Upon arriving within a French port, the crew in the French naval ships saluted the flag.
The initial design is credited to Betsy Ross, and possesses the familiar circle variety of the 13 stars – for that original 13 colonies. Eventually since the country grew, the number of stars were required to grow also. The following version had 15 stars, as Vermont and Kentucky joined the Union. This new flag came to exist in 1795. The flag went through numerous iterations as new states were added to the country. However an issue was brewing over how a flag was being misused.
Ahead of 1897 numerous opportunists took the nationalistic feelings instilled in the flag’s image as avenues to market their wares or political opinions. The flag took over as backdrop to advertising or other questionable purposes. Like a marketer could post an add on a flag and wave it around in the crowd.
An attempt was developed to get federal legislation passed that could ban desecration with the flag. After failing with the federal level, Illinois, South dakota, and Pennsylvania brought out state laws in 1897 that made it illegal to position any kind of markings about the flag, to work with the flag in any kind of marketing, as well as to mutilate, trample, deface, or defile the flag.
It was not until 1968 that flag desecration became federal law. A flag was burned in The big apple City’s Central Park to protest the Vietnam War. Congress then passed a whole new law which makes it illegal to knowingly cast contempt upon any flag of the us by “publicly mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning or trampling upon it.”
This law has been challenged often times since. The hub in the concern is finding the balance between flag desecration and freedom of speech rights. Inside a 1972 decision, the last Court held that Massachusetts could not prosecute someone who wore a flag for the seat of his pants. In 1974 the final Court decided that freedom of speech overrode flag desecration in a case involving a person that affixed a peace sign on the flag in protest with the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
Perhaps the thorniest issue of contemporary times could be the technique words “under God” inside the Pledge of Allegiance. In 2002 a Ninth Circuit Federal appeals court decided that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional because of the line “one nation, under God.” In 2004, however, the last Court declined to know the same case, thereby leaving the inclusion of “under God” intact in the Pledge of Allegiance for some of the country.
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