Day: May 3, 2007

I had nev­er real­ly giv­en a lot of thought to the design of the “Union Jack” before. The mix of diag­o­nals and cross­es in th mod­ern flag is actu­al­ly the sum of the flags of Eng­land, Scot­land, and Ire­land, as seen here. The Union Flag also shows up in many of the coun­tries still under the Monar­chy, such as Aus­tralia and New Zealand (not to men­tion var­i­ous small­er island nations). It also is in the flags of the State of Hawai’i and was even incor­po­rat­ed into the orig­i­nal Amer­i­can flag (the Grand Union Flag), when we were still an British colony. We dropped the Union Jack in favor of a field of stars whose num­ber would be equal to the num­ber of states in the Union.Several of the Cana­di­an provinces (British Colum­bia, Man­i­to­ba, Ontario), though it is notably miss­ing in the Cana­di­an nation­al flag. This may be in part to the fact that sev­er­al oth­er provinces have flags of Scot­land or Eng­land in them, and not the Union Flag. We may not be loy­al sub­ject of HM the Queen any­more, but at least we still get a long well enough to have her over every now and then.