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Count the stripes on an American flag. You get thirteen. Count the stars and you get fifty. Both numbers are counting something real — and they are not counting the same thing.
Find an American flag. On a wall, on a stamp, on a screen.
Count the stripes. Red, white, red, white, all the way down. You will get thirteen.
Now count the stars in the blue corner. There are a lot of them. There are fifty.
Somebody picked those two numbers on purpose. Neither one is decoration.
Ask someone what the stars are for. They will usually say: one for each state.
That part is true.
Now ask what the stripes are for. Lots of people say the same thing again — one for each state.
Both of those cannot be true. If the stars and the stripes were counting the same thing, the two numbers would match.
Fifty is not thirteen. So they are counting two different things.
The stars and the stripes are both counting states. They are counting them at two different times.
The stars are the states there are today. Fifty states, fifty stars.
The stripes are the states there were right at the start. When the country began there were only thirteen of them.
So the blue corner is a picture of now. The stripes are a picture of the beginning.
Which means something has to happen when a brand new state joins.
A brand new state joins tomorrow. What gets added to the flag?
For a while, people added a stripe as well.
Two new states joined, and the flag got two more stars and two more stripes. For over twenty years the flag had fifteen stripes on it. It was a real flag. It really flew.
Then people thought ahead. More states were coming. Lots more. A flag with a stripe for every single one would end up covered in thin little lines.
So Congress — the group of grown-ups who make the country's rules — decided the stripes would go back to thirteen and stay at thirteen. Only the stars would keep growing.
Stars can be added. Stripes cannot. Somebody decided that, and it has held ever since.
Every one of these belongs to one of the two. Put it where it goes.
Tap an item, then tap where it belongs
You are in a museum. There is an old flag in a glass case. You count its stars and there are only thirteen. What does that tell you?
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That’s the last one in this channel for now. More are on the way.
Back to all episodesFlag Resolution of June 14, 1777: the flag of the thirteen United States is to be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, with the union thirteen stars, white in a blue field (Journals of the Continental Congress; Library of Congress). The Flag Act of January 13, 1794, effective May 1795, raised the flag to fifteen stars AND fifteen stripes after Vermont and Kentucky were admitted. That fifteen-stripe flag flew for over twenty years; it is the one that flew over Fort McHenry in 1814 and now hangs in the Smithsonian (Smithsonian National Museum of American History). The Flag Act of April 4, 1818 returned the stripes permanently to thirteen for the original thirteen states, and provided that one star be added for each new state, taking effect on the July 4th following its admission. The reason recorded at the time was that adding a stripe per state would make the flag unworkable as the country grew (Library of Congress; U.S. House of Representatives history). Hawaii was admitted in 1959 and the fifty-star flag became official on July 4, 1960. It is the longest-serving version of the flag (U.S. House of Representatives history). Stripe colours and count: seven red and six white, alternating, beginning and ending with red (Flag Resolution of 1777; 4 U.S.C. §1).