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Relates how a Philadelphia seamstress helped design and make the first flag to represent the United States of America. ... Read more

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Mary Emmerling presents a fun, moving, joyous, and colorful celebration of the symbol that represents America at its best. In a style both charming and unabashedly patriotic, Mary shows how the Stars and Stripes turns up on garden fences, Navajo rugs, quilts, pottery, pillows, and other pieces of authentic Americana. Full-color photographs. ... Read more

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america the beautiful
i love my country and my flag, this book is beautiful, i love looking at all the pictures of the flags. this book is on display with pride in my home. ... Read more

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Browsers and young students alike will enjoy these lively question and answer books with their unique mix of realistic illustration and engaging cartoons. The enticing questions will amaze, amuse and inspire, while the highly visual format encourages kids to keep reading. ... Read more

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A short play dramatizes the legend of how Betsy Ross came to make the first United States flag. ... Read more

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"Flag for a New Country" is one of five books in the Holiday Play Series.Intended as a teacher/student learning tool, this scripted play is written for 24 major character roles, as well as many roles for extras.Synopsis of Play:In 1620, pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to start the first permanent English colony in North America.After a long sea voyage, they landed on the east coast of a new land.This settlement by the pilgrims became the cornerstone of a new nation.By 1640, there were thirteen colonies along the east coast, and 16,000 settlers.The colonies were like thirteen small countries.King George III sent men from England to govern the new American colonies.The King's men set high taxes on the supplies sent to the American colonies.Many colonists stopped buying from England and rebelled against the English taxes.They wanted to right to vote on the taxes they were asked to pay.The English governors did not listen to the Americans.The colonists then knew it was time to form their own government and start their own country.Men from each of the separate colonies came together at a Continental Congress to make plans for the future.Forming theis Continental Congress was against the laws of England.The colonists were committing treason, punishable by death.People in the colonies called these brave founding fathers "patriots".The new American flag, with one star for each colony, helped unite the people.It gave them hope for a better life in their new country.They would be free to make their own laws.They would be free from the bonds of England. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Not since 1877 has anyone attempted to assemble a history of Sonoma County towns and their post offices. Thoroughly researched from national, state and county archives and supplemented by illustrations of rare photographs and postal artifacts, Bear Flag Country promises to set a new standard for this type of reference. The illustrations alone represent nearly a decade of intensive collecting and correspondence with sources all over the United States. In addition to concise histories of over a hundred Sonoma County post office towns, the author has used National Archives documents to construct maps of historic postal routes, uncovering surprising information on the origins of county town names. The same documents, through his painstaking efforts, have also yielded both a complete roster of private mail contract carriers and an annotated list of all Sonoma County Postmasters dated from 1849. An extensive bibliography is appended. ... Read more

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The 125th Illinois Infantry was organized at Danville, Illinois and mustered in for three years service on September 3, 1862 under the command of Colonel Oscar Fitzalan Harmon.The regiment was attached to 36th Brigade, 11th Division, Army of the Ohio, to October 1862. 36th Brigade, 11th Division, III Corps, Army of the Ohio, to November 1862. 2nd Brigade, 4th Division, Centre, XIV Corps, Army of the Cumberland, to January 1863. 2nd Brigade, 4th Division, XIV Corps, to June 1863. 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division, Reserve Corps, Army of the Cumberland, to October 1863. 3rd Brigade. 2nd Division, XIV Corps, Army of the Cumberland and Army of Georgia, to June 1865.The 125th Illinois Infantry mustered out of service on June 9, 1865. ... Read more

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Just One Man's Personal Story
It is difficult for me to be impartial about this book as I am a descendant nephew of John Daniel. The book is alive as you can see the copies of the actual letters accompanied by the "translation".I was enthralled by this book - following John step-by-step through the campaigns and then to find out that he was killed in the battle of Atlanta. His final letter is reminiscent of a Hollywood war film - surprising for a man with his background. I was stunned and excited to find out that his grave is only an hour from my home. Great story about my Great-Great Uncle.

This is a rare "un-filtered" story about the Civil War. ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Need a quick reference guide for all Country Flags? This is it. ... Read more

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This history of Ireland in three volumes is an analysis of the country and its inhabitants from the earliest prehistory to the eventful years of the 1910s and 20s. The first volume begins with the question "who were the Irish?" and ends in the early 1860s. ... Read more

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Looking down one's nose at history
This is the second book in a three-volume series on Irish nationalism. And having finished it, I'm sorry to have to say I will not be reading the other two books.

Leaving aside the viscous prose which one wades through like glue (it seemed to take forever to finish less than 300 pages), it is the author's undisguised condescension and historical bias which torpedoes the book's credibility. One would think that an Englishman writing about Ireland's struggle for liberation from English rule would exercise caution for fear of accusations of a jaundiced retelling. But not Kee.

Right from the beginning we are told that the early Fenians 'looked like fools or mountebanks or worse' [p. 8]; the Young Ireland movement was characterised by 'fatally preoccupying illusions' [p. 9]; James Stephens' exhibited 'a curious strain of bombast and incompetence' [p. 16]; popular sympathy with rebels 'was emotional and confused rather than expressive of identity with specific political aims' [p. 44]; one of Yeats' speeches on Irish nationalism is 'cliche-ridden' [p. 128]; on the cultural revival Kee follows D.P. Moran's dicta and states that 'Irishmen had gone in for clatter and claptrap which they miscalled nationality, playing the fool throughout the century like a lot of hysterical old women' [p. 137]; Irish sympathy with the Boers' liberation struggle is sardonically described as the inclination of 'a Dublin mob to riot in favour of the Transvaal Committee' [p. 148]; Arthur Griffith's great book on The Resurrection of Hungary is explained 'at often tedious length and with some dubious historical interpretation' [p. 154]; Griffith himself was 'sometimes narrow-minded ...lacking in humour [and] ... rather gauche' [p. 156/7]; the Fenians in America are 'extremists' [p. 175]; with regards to the IRB's planned rising, Kee ventriloquizes that 'to the overwhelming majority of the Irish people it would have seemed impractical and childish nonsense' [p. 234], later referred to as a 'hare-brained scheme' [p. 241]; the 1916 Rising itself is snottily described as a 'republic in the Post Office' [p. 253]; there are knowingly snide references to 'the nebulous cause that was Ireland's' [p. 48]; note the scare quotes placed around the key word in Kee's reference to 'Gaelic, the "national" language' [p. 108]; it's even necessary to pettily remind the reader than the patriot Countess Markievicz pronounced 'Ireland' as 'ahland' [p. 161]; and why is Joseph Chamberlain described as being '*understandably* ... bewildered by the term Irish nationalism'? [p. 93]

There is some particularly squalid weasel-wording surrounding the 1914 shooting of civilians at Bachelor's Walk in Dublin. The reader is informed that 'no soldier fired more than two rounds' (imagine Colonel Dyer presenting that rationale following Amristar) and that 'within a fortnight a government commission concluded that the actions of the troops had been "tainted with illegality" and specifically censured the troops for lack of control and discipline. This does not exactly square with a picture of tyrannical repressive government.' [p. 215] Were there prison sentences? Fines? Dismissals? Even compensation for the victims' families? Of course, none of these were forthcoming after the Bachelor's Walk killings, and Kee is studiously silent on that fact. His first instinct is to grasp at the exculpatory straw.

All of the standard English cliches are here: the alleged drunkenness, disorganisation and condign misery of the mere Irish. And throughout the book there seems to be a sly attempt to persuade the reader that the Irish really weren't interested in their own nationalism in the first place: time and again Kee's Procrustean analysis proceeds as though all *true* nationalist movements are rigidly consistent even throughout a centuries-long history and are not subject to crests and troughs of popular support, vicissitudes often influenced by economic conditions or more quotidian considerations. Moreover, there are some silly mistakes made. The mythical Celtic warrior Fionn MacCumhaill, for example, is at one point referred to as 'Fiona' (a girl's name) [p. 14] and the author describes Kildare as being 'in the centre of Ireland' [p. 191] when a glance at his own map would have confirmed that Kildare is separated from the coast only by Dublin.

But among this gallery of putative wastrels there must surely be at least one worthwhile Irishman? And indeed there is: the one person for whom Kee reserves uncritical praise is Edward Carson, dogged opponent of Irish Home Rule, reactionary demagogue, and probably the greatest opponent of Irish nationalism to come from within Ireland itself. The sole dominion in which Carson is today regarded with any reverence is the moribund world of Ulster Unionism (his statute can be seen outside Stormont, gesticulating angrily). It was he who was proximately responsible for the partition of Ireland and the creation of an artificial and wilfully discriminatory statelet whose overarching raison d'etre was hatred for fellow Irishmen simply because they were Catholics. Today the Unionists of Northern Ireland (whose lower birth rate dooms them to become outpopulated by nationalists within decades) cling to the vestiges of a long-dead British Empire while the Republic's future - by contrast - is solid and progressive. In short, it was obvious even when Kee was writing his book in the mid-seventies that Carson was a figure who had been left fossilised by the march of history, but that did not prevent him from confecting the following encomium. Carson 'was no blind reactionary', we are informed. Rather, Kee gushes that:

'Courage, single-mindedness, clear-sightedness and determination, but above all unquestionable and unflinching honesty of purpose were his salient characteristics ... he was an Irishman whose devotion to the country of his birth was as great as his devotion to its union with the rest of the British Isles'. [p. 169] Leaving aside the offensive anachrony of labelling Ireland a 'British Isle', even a cursory glance at the record is enough to dismiss this casuistry. Carson was about as dedicated to the 'country of his birth' as the French novelist Camus was to his 'native' Algeria. Quite how anyone who worked as hard as Carson did to squash even the mildest of Irish endeavours at national self-determination could be regarded as 'dedicated to his country' is never explained. Kee informs us that 'he had shown some personal courage in expressing his disdain for the mob at Mitchelstown on a day when three people were killed there by the RIC' [p. 170] - disdain for victims of state violence presumably being one of Carson's more 'courageous' traits. (Most squalidly, Kee remarks that Carson had 'made his name' at the bar in Ireland but is careful not to mention that he did so largely by exposing to an intolerant society the homosexuality of the much-admired Oscar Wilde and thereby ruining him.) In the end, however, Carson was unable to stop the march of history and was left, Arafat-like, within the vestiges of a shrunken sectarian statelet. Thus ended the career of Kee's only worthwhile Irishman. He ruined Ireland's territorial integrity, and all for a Unionist cause that had no long-term future.

Why did Kee do it? Why take the trouble to write a mean-spirited and condescending book about a small, defenseless and largely uninfluential nation? (At every turn one senses Kee fossicking through the archives and gleefully jotting down every incriminating quote or titbit of history: any historical counter-points too bulky to ignore he hurriedly undercuts - and does it too frequently to cover his agenda.) The answer lies in the introduction to the first volume, where Kee incautiously describes Ireland's liberation as being the first disastrous step in the unravelling of the British Empire. In Latin, this fallacy is known as 'sic hoc ergo propter hoc' - the belief that because event x happens *after* event y, it must be *because* of event y. So we are invited by implication to imagine that had the inconsiderate Irish not asserted their rights to independence, the British Empire would have lived on like the thousand year Reich (ignoring the fact that every other European colonial power's empires had deliquesced completely within decades of Irish independence). Leaving aside that this ragged analysis accidentally *blames* the Irish for helping those other millions of people come out from under the English jackboot (liberation from imperialist rule being surely an unwelcome development), it is a historical fantasy - and the most egregious form of victim-blaming - to pretend that the fulcrum holding the entire British Empire together was located among the mere Irish, and that because this one small screw fell out, the whole apparatus came asunder. This is the one bitter sticking point which Kee seemingly cannot swallow - that despite all the difficulties, all the suffering, and all Kee's anachronistic re-rationalizing, the Irish nation is today a geographical and political fact, and virtually all Irishmen are proud of it. Thus the Irish nationalist project, despite numerous setbacks and disappointments, has been a story of heroism, considerable self-sacrifice, and triumph against the odds. Kee could never bring himself to recognize that.

Excellent
The complex politics of the Irish revolt against the English is brought into a new light by Robert Kee.Kee manages to describe the failures and successes of Irish nationalism over the centuries in an exceedinglyreadable book.The Green Flag consists of three volumes ending in 1973 andso does not cover the recent conflict. It is still one of the best booksever written on Irish history. ... Read more

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General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1917Notes: This is an OCR reprint of the original rare book. There may be typos or missing text and there are no illustrations.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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Capiataine, Capitaine.... Real Mardi Gras for Real People
I am married to a Red Blooded Acadian Cajun and we attend Mardi Gras every year in Eunice and Church Point Louisiana.....

This is as good as it gets if you want a real Historical Mardi Gras experience...

More people need to know that Mardi Grad is not just about T & A , but about family and cultural tradition.. ... Read more