Did you know that flags are actually pictures that send a message to everyone who sees them? In The Flag Book you'll uncover the hidden meanings of flags- from country and state colours to flags used in sports, on ships and aeroplanes, and by the most dastardly of Caribbean pirates.

Three kids get caught up in an adventure of historic proportions!Anna, José, and Henry are complete strangers with more in common than they realize. Snowed in together at a chaotic Washington D.C. airport, they encounter a mysterious tattooed man, a flamboyant politician, and a rambunctious poodle named for an ancient king. Even stranger, news stations everywhere have announced that the famous flag that inspired "The Star-Spangled Banner" has been stolen! Anna, certain that the culprits must be snowed in too, recruits Henry and José to help catch the thieves and bring them to justice. But when accusations start flying, they soon realize there's more than justice at stake. As the snow starts clearing, Anna, José, and Henry find themselves in a race against time (and the weather!) to prevent the loss of an American treasure.

One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 Bill McKibben—award-winning author, activist, educator—is fiercely curious. “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.” Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth. But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril. And he is curious: What the hell happened? In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.

An introduction to the American flag relates its history and explains the ideals it represents.

Americans honor the flag with a fervor seen in few other countries: The Stars and Stripes decorate American homes and businesses; wave over sports events and funerals; and embellish everything from politicians' lapels to the surface of the moon. But what does the flag mean? In Capture the Flag, historian Woden Teachout reveals that it has held vastly different meanings over time. It has been claimed by both the right and left; by racists and revolutionaries; by immigrants and nativists. In tracing the political history of the flag from its origins in the American Revolution through the present day, Teachout demonstrates that the shifting symbolism of the flag reveals a broader shift in the definition of American patriotism. A story of a nation in search of itself, Capture the Flag offers a probing account of the flag that has become America's icon.

From a pool of barely nine thousand men of military age, Nebraska—still a territory at the time—sent more than three thousand soldiers to the Civil War. They fought and died for the Union cause, were wounded, taken prisoner, and in some cases deserted. But Nebraska’s military contribution is only one part of the more complex and interesting story that James E. Potter tells in Standing Firmly by the Flag, the first book to fully explore Nebraska’s involvement in the Civil War and the war’s involvement in Nebraska’s evolution from territory to thirty-seventh state on March 1, 1867. Although distant from the major battlefronts and seats of the warring governments, Nebraskans were aware of the war’s issues and subject to its consequences. National debates about the origins of the rebellion, the policies pursued to quell it, and what kind of nation should emerge once it was over echoed throughout Nebraska. Potter explores the war’s impact on Nebraskans and shows how, when Nebraska Territory sought admission to the Union at war’s end, it was caught up in political struggles over Reconstruction, the fate of the freed slaves, and the relationship between the states and the federal government.

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