Presents
Red, White, and Blue: The Story of the American Flag
Actors: Betsy Ross, George Washington, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, Neil Armstrong
Washington: We all know the American flag. Its bright colors fly at baseball games.
Key: It flies at Fourth of July parades.
Ross: We even see it on clothes!
Lincoln: Our flag has lots of nicknames – like…
Ross and Washington: Old Glory and…
Armstrong: the Red, White, and Blue.
Lincoln: But where did our flag come from? Who decided what it would look like?
Key: The truth is that no one knows for sure.
Washington: Back in the 1700s, America didn’t have a flag.
Boys: It didn’t need one.
Armstrong: It wasn’t even a country.
Ross: It was just thirteen colonies.
Lincoln: The original 13 American colonies were:
Girls: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut…
Washington: New York and New Jersey…
Lincoln: Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland
Key: Virginia and North Carolina…
Boys: South Carolina and Georgia.
Ross: These colonies belonged to England.
Armstrong: The English flag flew in towns from New Hampshire to Georgia.
Washington: But as time went on, the thirteen colonies didn’t want to belong to England anymore.
Betsy Ross: Americans decided to fight for their freedom.
Key: A war began. It was the American Revolution.
Lincoln: Now a new flag was needed -
All: An American flag!
Betsy Ross: You may ask, “Who made
our first flag?” Some people say that I
made it, Betsy Ross.
Key: Maybe you have heard of her.
Betsy Ross: I owned a sewing shop in
Philadelphia. I was famous for my sewing.
Lincoln: The story is that one day a general came to see her.
Washington: I was that general, George Washington. I was the head of the American army.
Armstrong: General Washington wanted a new flag.
Washington: I believed that it would make my soldiers feel like a real army fighting for a real country.
Key: He wanted Betsy Ross to make this flag.
Betsy Ross: General Washington even drew a picture of what he wanted.
Lincoln: Betsy Ross made some changes.
Betsy Ross: Then I showed the picture to General
Washington. He liked it!
Girls: Betsy Ross sewed the flag.
Washington: And that was the very first Stars and Stripes.
Key: That is the story –
Armstrong: - and it’s a good one. But is it true?
Lincoln: Betsy Ross’s grandson said it was. He said that Betsy told him the story when he was a little boy…
Betsy Ross: …and I was an old woman of eighty-four. But there is no proof for this story.
All: So what do we know for sure?
Armstrong: We know that during the Revolution the colonists used lots of different flags.
Washington: But once the colonies became the United States of America, the country needed one flag –
All: the same flag for everybody!
Key: So on June 14, 1777, a decision was made. The flag was going to have thirteen red and white stripes.
Betsy Ross: The flag was also going to have thirteen white stars on a blue background,
Boys: …one for each of the thirteen colonies.
Lincoln: Now the United States had a flag.
Washington: Congress had picked the colors and stars and stripes. But Congress did not say where the stars and stripes had to go.
Armstrong: So the flag still did not always look the same!
Betsy Ross: Sometimes the stripes went
up and down.
Lincoln: Sometimes the stars were in a circle.
All: But nobody minded.
Washington: Up and down or side to side,
the stars and stripes still stood for the
United States.
Armstrong: Over the years, the flag became more and more important to people.
Key: In 1812, the United States was at war with England again. British soldiers came to America.
Ross: They sailed up our rivers.
Girls: They marched down our streets.
Lincoln: They even burned down the White House – the home of the President.
Washington: On the night of September 13, 1814, British soldiers bombed a fort in Maryland.
Armstrong: All that night a man watched the fighting.
Key: I am that man, Francis Scott Key. I was afraid. What if the American soldiers in the fort gave up?
Ross: But in the early morning light,
Francis Scott Key saw the Stars
and Stripes.
Key: It was still flying above the fort!
I knew American soldiers had won the
battle. I felt very proud.
Lincoln: He wrote a poem about
the flag on the fort. The poem was…
All: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Key: Later my poem was put to music. This song about our flag became a song for our whole country.
Armstrong: The flag that Francis Scott
Key saw had fifteen stripes and
fifteen stars.
All: Why?
Lincoln: Because by then there were two more states – Vermont and Kentucky.
Ross: Our country was getting bigger. People were heading out west.
Washington: In time, more places were going to want to be states. Soon there would be too many stripes to fit on the flag.
Boys: Congress had to do something.
Armstrong: So in 1818 this is what was decided: The flag would go back to thirteen red and white stripes.
Key: And in the blue box would be one white star for each state.
Ross: Every time there was a new state, a new star would be added.
Lincoln: At last the Stars and Stripes looked the same everywhere it flew.
Washington: And Americans were proud of their flag. They took the flag with them as they moved west.
Armstrong: The flag crossed the Mississippi River and the great grassy plains and the Rocky Mountains.
Lincoln: It made it all the way to California.
Key: More and more states were added to the country. And more and more stars were added to the flag.
Ross: By 1837, there were twenty- six stars on the flag. By 1850, there were…
All: thirty-one.
Boys: One country.
Girls: One flag.
Washington: But then in 1861,
something happened. Our country
split in two.
Lincoln: Eleven states in the
South broke away from the United
States of America.
Ross: They started their own States of America.
Lincoln: I am Abraham Lincoln. I was President of the United States. I said that all the states had to stay together.
Armstrong: War broke out – the Civil War. It was a very sad time in the history of our country.
Lincoln: The eleven southern states stopped flying the Stars and Stripes. They had their own flag.
Key: In the North, some people wanted eleven stars taken off the Stars and Stripes.
Lincoln: But I said that I would not do that. I told them that the states would get back together.
All: He was right!
Washington: The Civil War ended in 1865. The North won.
Armstrong: And the United States was one country under one flag again.
Ross: On June 14, 1877, the flag had a birthday – a big one.
Boys: It was 100 years old.
Key: All across the country, people had picnics and parties and parades.
Lincoln: June 14 became a holiday – Flag Day.
Washington: Today our flag has fifty stars for the fifty
United States of America. Some of the flags are huge.
Girls: One weighs 500 pounds!
Armstrong: It is flown every Fourth of July from the George Washington Bridge.
Ross: The American flag flies in towns and cities from coast to coast.
Boys: And that’s not all!
Armstrong: In 1969, Buzz Aldrin and I, Neil Armstrong, were the first people ever to land on the moon.
Key: The astronauts took lots of moon rocks back to Earth.
Armstrong: We also left something behind on the moon…
All: …the Stars and Stripes.
Girls: And do you know what?
All: Our flag is still flying there!
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