Capture the Flag

This slim volume offers a European's overview of the semiotic struggle to control the flag of the United States and the shifting cultural traditions and uses associated with that banner since the nation's inception. For a more profound and detailed look at eight specific paradigm dramas in the historical struggle over that flag's meaning, the reader is better advised to consult Woden Teachout's similarly titled 2009 book, Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism. Arnaldo Testi draws on Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle's description of the American flag as a totem requiring blood sacrifice to set up a dichotomy of two conflicting yet simultaneously evolving traditions for understanding it: as totem of freedom or totem of empire. The book is divided into four sections, each with no more than three or four brief chapters. The first section reviews the history of the flag, zeroing in on a few famous patriotic paintings, the rise of the cult of the flag in the late nineteenth century, and the eventual institutionalization of the Flag Code in the twentieth century. The second section of the book concentrates on the symbol as the flag of freedom, with attention to the practice of the Pledge of Allegiance; uses of the flag by such varying groups as abolitionists, nativists, labor movements, and immigrants; and the tradition of the American jeremiad. The third section shifts focus to the flag of empire, specifically the judicial debate over whether the Constitution follows the flag into annexed territories, the iconic power of the Iwo Jima tableau, and the international (even interplanetary) message of the American flag on the moon. In the final section, Testi addresses the semiotic battle for control of the symbol in three brief essays that cover the rise of federal laws against flag desecration and Supreme Court reactions, the use of the national banner in twentieth-century popular art, and, very briefly, a summary of the use of the American flag immediately after September 11, 2001, and then as a symbol of war in Iraq

Ancient history · Art · Cult · Flag (linear algebra · Literature · Political science · Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Military History and Strategy

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