Articles

The oldest patriotic flag flown in North America is not Canada's. It is a white infinity symbol on a field of blue or red, and it was carried into a f...

Sail into a Swedish naval base and look up at the flagpole. The flag snapping over the base is not the flag printed on Swedish passports or road signs...

Somalia's flag has five points on its star. Only two of them have ever belonged to Somalia. That is not a design flaw. It is the point. When Somalia's...

In August 1948, a Korean Workers' Party theorist named Kim Tu-bong sat down to explain why his country needed a brand new flag. He didn't soften the a...

South Africa's flag holds a Guinness World Record for the most colors in a national flag among United Nations member states. Six colors, arranged in a...

New Zealand spent NZ$26 million asking its own citizens a single question, twice: do you want a new flag? Twice, the answer came back no. Turnout for ...

In 1999, Georgia's parliament voted to give the country a new flag. Five red crosses on white, replacing the maroon banner the republic had flown sinc...

Bolivia is the only country on Earth whose constitution names two national flags. One is the red, yellow and green tricolor most people picture when t...

In February 1998, Bosnia and Herzegovina got a national flag that no Bosnian had chosen. Not a soldier, not a voter, not a single elected member of it...

On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia stopped existing. Two new countries woke up in its place, and within days, one of them had broken a rule written in...

In 1959, a 23-year-old engineering student in London saw a small notice about a competition to design a new national flag. He mailed in a sketch, won ...

Look at the flags of Jordan and Iraq side by side and you'll swear they belong to different families entirely. Jordan wears a red triangle stabbed int...

Fifty state flags fly over the United States, and only one of them carries another nation's flag inside it. This isn't a faded echo or a borrowed colo...

Mississippi's state flag has flown a magnolia before. That's the part most coverage of the 2020 redesign left out. When voters replaced the Confederat...

Look closely at the center of Mexico's flag and you'll find a golden eagle standing on a cactus, a snake caught in its beak. Almost every visitor to M...

Most national flags borrow a symbol from somewhere else: a plant, an animal, a weapon, a constellation. Mongolia did something stranger. It put a sing...

Every national flag on Earth is a rectangle, except one. Nepal's flag is a double pennant, two triangular banners stacked and fused into a shape close...

Bhutan's flag is famous for its dragon. Druk, the white thunder dragon, sprawls across the diagonal between the yellow and orange halves, clutching je...

National flags get the famous dragons: Bhutan's thunder dragon, the red dragon of Wales. But the dragon's steadiest employment has always been municip...

Most independence flags are new inventions. Ceylon's was a restoration. When the island became independent in 1948, it did not commission a fresh desi...

Before there was Thailand, there was Siam, and before Thailand's familiar red, white, and blue stripes, there was one of the most beloved designs in f...

Grenada's flag holds a national record almost nobody notices: it is the only national flag in the world with a nutmeg on it. But the question people a...

Every country has a flag. Almost every country also has a second, less famous symbol: the national emblem, the device that appears on passports, coins...