The Journaling of Hinton 389

Flag Day in the United States is a holiday of honor and national pride, a day to figuratively" rally round the flag." Flag Day has its origins in the Second Continental Congress. The original use of this design was to serve as the flag carried into battle (the Revolutionary War was still well under way). The flag was first carried in the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777. In these early days of the United States flag, it was displayed on naval ships and eventually became accepted and honored by the new United States citizens and by foreign nationals as well. In 1778 Captain Paul Jones commanded the naval warship "the Ranger" on which the flag was placed. Upon arriving in a French port, the crew of the French naval ships saluted the flag. The original design is credited to Betsy Ross, and contains the familiar circle array of the 13 stars - for the original 13 colonies. Eventually as the country grew, the number of stars had to grow as well. Content was generated by https://essayfreelancewriters.comversion.

The next version had 15 stars, as Vermont and Kentucky joined the Union. This new flag came into being in 1795. click for more went through numerous iterations as new states were added to the country. However an issue was brewing over how the flag was being misused. Prior to 1897 a number of opportunists took the nationalistic feelings instilled in the flag's image as avenues to market their wares or political views. The flag became the backdrop to advertising or other questionable purposes. For example a marketer could post an add on a flag and wave it around in a crowd. An attempt was made to get federal legislation passed that would ban desecration of the flag. After failing at the federal level, Illinois, South Dakota, and Pennsylvania came out with state laws in 1897 that made it illegal to place any kind of markings on the flag, to use the flag in any kind of marketing, or to mutilate, trample, deface, or defile the flag.

It was not until 1968 that flag desecration became federal law. A flag was burned in New York City's Central Park to protest the Vietnam War. This law has been challenged many times since. At the heart of the issue is finding the balance between flag desecration and freedom of speech rights. In a 1972 decision, the Supreme Court held that Massachusetts could not prosecute a person who wore a flag on the seat of his pants. In 1974 the Supreme Court decided that freedom of speech overrode flag desecration in a case involving a person that affixed a peace sign over the flag in protest of the U.S. Perhaps the thorniest issue of recent times is the use of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. In 2002 a Ninth Circuit Federal appeals court decided that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional because of the line "one nation, under God." In 2004, however, the Supreme Court declined to hear a similar case, thereby leaving the inclusion of "under God" intact in the Pledge of Allegiance for most of the country.

This statistic was second to the African Americans. The Mexican Repatriation program sponsored by the US government during the Great Depression was intended for voluntary return to Mexico, however, it turned into a forcible deportation agenda. More than a million people faced deportation, and 60% of them were US citizens. The Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles in 1943 were instances of racial violence against Latinos. Naval soldiers posted in the Latino community conflicted with the youth in the densely populated neighborhood. It is a phenomenon portrayed by features of a defined structure, attitudes, and institutions that disadvantage a particular racial group, though not through apparent mechanisms. Significant racial gaps in wealth prevail in the United States with gap factor of twenty between whites and African Americans as well as other races. Racial coding breeds ideas of crime and welfare used for systematically swaying public opinion and political views against the minorities. The March 2010 report of the US Sentencing Commission stated that offenders who were black received 10% longer sentences than their white counterparts for the exact same crimes in the federal system. As brought out in this racism in America essay, racism has been at the center stage throughout the history and development of the United States. Efforts put in the hope of eradicating racism are futile as there are interest groups that seem to counter these efforts or install new mechanisms to drive the racism agenda for particular gains.

On November 22, 1963 the United States of America was taken over by a powerful group of individuals that included a number of CIA special team operatives, some employees and officials of the government and members of the Mafia. They did this by killing President John F. Kennedy and putting their man, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in the White House. The group included FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Mafia Boss Carlos Marcello and Mafia Banker Meyer Lansky. Although these men are dead today their positions of power are well kept by their predecessors. I am not saying that the current FBI Director is one of them only that someone has the power that J. Edgar Hoover had. They accomplished their feat with criminals and assets inside the government that included J. Edgar's private army of State, County and Local government employees most of which were convinced it was their job to save the country from the National Security Threat of Communism. The ideology of self-preservation was bolstered by the military-industrial complex that reaped billions of dollars each year from the Vietnam War, something even President Eisenhower warned the country of only a few years back from Kennedy's execution. This post was done with Essay Writers!