The history and design of the world’s flags, written up at length.
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Somewhere in Belgium in 1815, a French soldier raises a white cloth above a trench. He is done fighting, and the gesture is unmistakable. In Rome, in ...
Someone hands you a blank sheet of paper and asks you to sketch a flag from memory. Any flag. What do you draw? Horizontal stripes, almost certainly. ...
Imagine you're a protocol officer at the United Nations, arranging 193 flags in alphabetical order for a General Assembly session. You pull out Indone...
In February 2024, the flag of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, a horizontal tricolor of black, white, and green with a red triangle at the hoist ...
Of the 193 sovereign nations recognized by the United Nations, exactly one puts an open book of scripture on its flag. Not a cross, not a crescent, no...
On July 9, 2011, as crowds flooded the streets of Juba in 98-degree heat, a brand-new rectangle of cloth went up a flagpole for the first time. South ...
If you laid out the flags of all 193 UN member states on a table, you could sort nearly all of them into a handful of color families. Red-white-blue t...
In 2018, voters in New Caledonia, a French-administered archipelago in the South Pacific, went to the polls to decide whether to become an independent...
Place the flags of Tunisia and Azerbaijan side by side. Go ahead, pull them up on your screen. Both have a white crescent and star on a strong backgro...
Walk into any tattoo parlor in Chicago on a Saturday afternoon and flip through the flash book. Somewhere between the roses and the skulls, you'll fin...
In 1865, Paul Bogle led hundreds of Black Jamaicans to the Morant Bay courthouse to protest poverty, injustice, and the stranglehold of the planter cl...
Rank every national flag by how much cultural, political and geographic information it packs into a square centimetre, and one wins by a wide margin. ...
Lay every national and territorial flag in the world across a gymnasium floor and you would need a large gym. Over 200 flags, full of lions, eagles, c...
Out of nearly 200 sovereign states and dozens of territories worldwide, fewer than ten have ever placed a map or silhouette of their own territory on ...
Imagine standing on the deck of a Polynesian voyaging canoe a thousand years ago. The ocean is black. The horizon is gone. All you have is a tight dia...
In 2014, Indonesia threatened to formally protest to the International Olympic Committee after yet another broadcaster mixed up its flag with Monaco's...
On March 2, 1971, a young student named A.S.M. Abdur Rab stood on the rooftop of a dormitory at the University of Dhaka and raised a flag that did not...
In most countries, a national flag is designed to represent everyone, a unifying canvas of shared identity. But what happens when the flag of the winn...
Picture a national flag. Odds are you imagined horizontal or vertical stripes, because that is the default. Of the 193 UN member states, the overwhelm...
Most modern national flags are downstream of a medieval European system for telling armored men apart on a battlefield. Heraldry gave Europe a visual ...
Everyone can picture the flags of the United States or Japan. The flags nobody can picture are often the more interesting ones, because a country with...
A flag is a claim before it is a decoration. Raising one asserts that this territory has a government, that the government answers to a people, and th...
Flags get studied under a field called vexillology, which sounds drier than it is. What it involves in practice is reading a country's own account of ...
The Commonwealth is an unusual place to study flags, because so many of its members had to design one while carrying the marks of the same former rule...