This all still seemed too weird to be true, so I checked one of the sources of this section of the article in the notes. I then checked the online catalog of my local public library to see if they had this source, a book by T. Harry Williams, biographer of Beauregard. Here’s what he has to say about this issue:

"With War Department approval of his idea [for a new battle flag], Beauregard eagerly proceeded to get his first flags made while the army was in winter quarters. They were manufactured in the best tradition of Southern romance. At the time the three Cary girls [basically Confederate groupies] were on one of their periodic visits to camp. It was decided that they would contribute material from their dresses to make flags[...]. Material for additional flags would be procured from other ladies. Because of the origin of the silk in the first emblems, the backgrounds were more of a feminine pink than a martial red" (109-110; italics mine).

In the footnotes, besides letters in the Archives at the Library of Congress, the sources of this claim are cited as including “a multitude of letters on the origin of the battle flag in the Beauregard Papers (Confederate Hall, New Orleans) and in the Confederate Flag Correspondence (Confederate Museum, Richmond).” Seems legit.

That the earliest iteration of the rebel banner looks to modern eyes like it was made by a middle-school girl out of Starbursts may come as a shock to Yankees and Southerners alike. But as far as I can tell this odd little bit of flag history is true.


Sources:

Ward, Drew. "The official design of the Confederate Battle Flag per General PGT Beauregard's original design." Wikimedia Commons, 2015. Online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._T._Beauregard#/media/File:Confederate_Battle_Flag_%28official_design%29.png. Accessed 19 June 2017.

Williams, T. Harry. P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954.

When my girlfriend’s mom found out that I had started a blog about flags, she thought it was really, really funny. You see, on The Big Bang Theory, one of her favorite shows, a recurring bit is that one of the main characters, Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), a brilliant scientist with a comically flat affect, hosts a YouTube series on this very topic. It’s called “Fun with Flags.”

In the clip linked above, at first Penny (Kaley Cuoco), Sheldon's neighbor and show guest, tries to help Sheldon improve his robotic presentation style. As usual, he completely misinterprets her perfectly reasonable suggestions, to comic effect. By the end of the scene, Sheldon finally gets to the topic of flags. He bluntly declares that Nebraska’s -- Nebraska being Penny's home state -- “is simply the state’s seal on a field of blue.” He offers no other information and then the scene ends.

The joke, of course, is that Sheldon is into arcane, nerdy things just for the sake of being into them. He’s a weirdo, but an ultimately loveable one. Because he is such a self-serious know-it-all, he makes for a classic sitcom character.

This is all good. I get the joke. At first glance it is pretty esoteric, taking such an active interest in the colorful rectangles of cloth that we put on poles.

But I don't mind. The stigma of geekiness aside, I still think flags are worth learning about and discussing. Looking into the details of the lore and designs of flags and seals as a “shorthand of history,” as vexillology has been called, is a perfectly fine lens with which to better understand the world.

So thanks, Sheldon, for bringing it up. And Happy Flag Day.

P.S. There basically is a real-life version of "Fun with Flags." It's called "Flag Friday" and is hosted by Paul "Barby" Barbato of the YouTube channel Geography Now! Check it out, it's a lot of fun.

This post I wrote about vexillology appeared on the University of Illinois' International and Area Studies blog on September 17, 2015:

http://publish.illinois.edu/iaslibrary/2015/09/17/whats-in-a-flag/

The official flag of the City of Chicago was originally adopted in 1917. It was then amended in 1933 and 1939, when its two additional stars were added, respectively.

The cyan and white bars represent geographical features of the city: the cyan stripes for Lake Michigan and the North Branch of the Chicago River; the top, middle, and bottom white bars for the North, West, and South Sides, respectively.

The four red, six-pointed stars symbolize four of the most historically significant events in the city's history. The first is for the U.S. Army's Fort Dearborn and the massacre of settlers and destruction that took place there in 1812 at the hands of local Native Americans. The second is for the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which wreaked havoc on the city, destroying a large portion of its buildings and infrastructure. The third represents the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, a truly international event and a major milestone in establishing Chicago as a world-class city. (The 2003 best-seller The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson details this extraordinary event.) And the fourth star represents the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-34, which commemorated Chicago's first one hundred years of existence and further bolstered the effects of the Columbian Exposition forty years earlier. It was speculated that if Chicago had won its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics (instead of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), that event would have been a prime candidate for a fifth star on the flag.  

Each star's six points represents a unique value, attribute, or historical fact about the city. The first star's points represent transportation, labor, commerce, finance, populousness, and salubrity (a fancy way of saying healthiness). For the second star, the values of religion, education, aesthetics, justice, beneficence, and civic pride are symbolized. The points of the third star stand for the six governments that the territory of Illinois (and what eventually became Chicago) has been ruled by: France (1693), Great Britain (1763), Virginia (1778), Northwest Territory (1798), Indian Territory (1802), and the State of Illinois (1818). The last star's points stand for various mottos, nicknames, and other concepts relating to Chicago: its status as the United States' third largest city; the City seal's Latin motto Urbs in Horto ("City in a Garden"); the motto "I will"; Chicago as "Great Central Market" to the nation; "Wonder City" in reference to its rapid growth and national economic importance, especially at the turn of the 20th century; and its firmly established reputation as the "Convention City," where businessmen and women from around the nation and the globe often meet.  

Chicago's municipal flag is extremely popular among the city's inhabitants. The cyan bars and red stars can be seen in the form of tattoos, t-shirts, accessories, and beyond, in addition to various sizes of flags. In fact, the design is so beloved that in a survey conducted by the North American Vexillological Association in 2004, it was voted the second most popular American city flag; the number one spot went to Washington, D.C. 

For more information, see:

http://www.chipublib.org/chicago-facts/

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/August-2013/Chicago-City-Flag/

As mentioned in a previous post of this blog, the significance of flags has recently come to the fore with the emergence of photos of suspected killer of nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylann Storm Roof. As much as his actions were uncategorically despicable, their symbolic resonance calls for further analysis. In one photo, Roof wears a jacket with two patches sewn onto the right breast: those of the former regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa, each ruled - until 1980 for the former and 1994 for the latter - by a white minority and governed with systemic prejudice against non-white inhabitants and particularly black Africans.  

Above are these former flags along with their present-day iterations. Placing them back-t0-back shows the drastic changes in political structure that they underwent, namely from white-minority rule to universal suffrage and an official policy of representative democracy. What may be less obvious, though, are some elements that have been retained from one to the other. 

Most interesting about the transformation from the flag of the former Rhodesia to that of modern-day Zimbabwe is that, despite all of the other changes, the golden Great Zimbabwe Bird remains. The World Encyclopedia of Flags and Heraldry (Slater and Znamierowski 2007: 228) explains, simply, that it represents "the great past of the country." More specifically, since the soapstone artifacts of the ancient site of Great Zimbabwe predate the modern era, it's interesting that both white-minority-ruled (and technically illegal by international consensus since its unilateral declaration of independence from Great Britain in 1965) Rhodesia and black-majority/socialist Zimbabwe have both co-opted the symbol's use in their flags, despite the extreme differences in each administration's politics. 

In the context of Roof's use of the former flag, however, its symbolism as the banner of an inherently racist government is most salient. The coat of arms at its center is based on that of Rhodesia's founder, South African mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, also the namesake of the Rhodes Scholarship Programme that allows international students the opportunity to study at Oxford, Rhodes' alma mater. In his name, mostly Anglo settlers originating in South Africa sought to establish a bastion of white rule in south-central Africa. 

For starters, the red star of socialism clearly distinguishes Zimbabwe's flag from that of Rhodesia. The green, yellow, and red are common among many African flags and traditionally stand for the earth, mineral resources, and the struggle for freedom, respectively. The black represents the vast majority of the nation's citizens.  

But of course South Africa has also wrestled with racial iniquity since its settlement by Dutch Boers ("farmers") in the 17th century. When the British arrived around a century later, the two groups fought vigorously for dominance over this strategic and vast territory that had been populated by various groups of black Africans for centuries, if not millennia. The former South African flag, in currency from 1928 until apartheid was dismantled in 1994, represents that jockeying for power between the descendents of Dutch and British settlers. The orange-white-blue horizontal tricolor of the flag's main body hearkens back to William of Orange, the Dutch nobleman who rebelled against Spain and gained the Netherlands its independence in the 17th century, around the same time that Dutchmen began to colonize South Africa. 

Looking at the old South African flag's central charge, the complexity of history and politics manifests itself in full force: the Union Jack shows the impact of Great Britain, particularly in the case of its former Cape Colony; the central flag is that of the Boers' Orange Free State, which took the orange of William's prinsenvlag for its three horizontal pallets (bars) on a white field, along with a canton (corner) of the alternate Dutch tricolor of red, white, and blue, the very same that remains in currency to this day for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. On the right is the flag of the other independent Boer republic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - the Transvaal. Its only distinction from the flag of the Netherlands proper is its green field at the hoist (left side), representing the open expanses of the territory's veld. 

When Nelson Mandela won the presidency at the nation's first fully democratic elections of 1994, it was only fitting that a new flag represent such a sea change. Noted for its unique design - which is also wildly popular among South Africans of all walks of life - the pall, or Y-shape, according to flag expert Whitney Smith, "stands for the coming together of many parts and the merging of past and present" (2001: 86). The black, yellow, and green represent Mandela's party, the African National Congress (ANC) while the red, white, and blue stand for the flags of the erstwhile Boer republics mentioned above.