#flag history

[nocternalrandomness]

Evolution of the American Flag

[filipinfodump]

FilipInfo Fact #11

The first iteration of the Philippine flag was created by the Filipino resistance group the Kataastaasan Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan or the Katipunan (en. Supreme and Honorable Association of the Children of the Nation; es. Suprema y Honorable Asociación de los Hijos del Pueblo), specifically commissioned by the president of the resistance and later President-dictator of the Philippines Emilio Aguinaldo.

It was sewn by Marcela Agoncillo, also known as the "Mother of the Philippine Flag", in her residence in Morrison Hill in Wan Chai, Hong Kong after Aguinaldo learned of her sewing skills when he met with her husband Felipe Agoncillo after they and other revolutionaries were exiled by the Spanish government over there which later led to the creation of the Hong Kong Junta. It is said that she asked assistance from her 7-year-old daughter, Lorenza, and her friend Delfina Herbosa de Natividad, who was the niece of Philippine hero Jose Rizal.

References:

Ang pambansang watawat ng Pilipinas [image]. (n.d.). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved on 10 June 2026, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Philippines_(1898%E2%80%931901).svg

De Guzman, S. (2021, June 11). How Marcela Agoncillo sewed her way into history as the ‘Mother of Philippine Flag’. PhilStar Life. Retrieved on 10 June 2026, from https://philstarlife.com/geeky/631991-marcela-agoncillo-mother-of-philippine-flag

Detail of Fernando Amorsolo's (1892 - 1972) The Making of the Philippine flag painting. [image]. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved on 10 June 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amorsolo%27s_The_Making_of_the_Philippine_Flag.png

[intervex]

Some new, bright variants of the Disability Pride flag (with historic colours)

The diagonal stripe Disability Pride flag design by @capricorn-0mnikorn et al is flexible about the specific colours used for the red, yellow, white, blue, and green stripes - there are a variety of versions ranging from full saturation to reduced saturation.

For fun -- and to lean into my proposal for the stripe colours to be about different models & causes of disability -- I thought I'd make variant versions where the stripe colours come from historic flags and symbols made by disability organizers!

These are intended as supplementary variants of the main versions for circumstances where we want to talk about disability history. (I think the standard, desaturated version is the best general-purpose disability pride flag!)

The versions on the left have a silver grey (#cfd1d0) background from the Eros Recio disability flag. The versions on the right have the original black. The black/grey is to mourn disabled people who have died due to eugenics, violence, neglect, and illness.

Red: disability caused by violence and/or neglect (itself a form of violence). Also models of disability like debility and disabled black feminist theorizing which focus on how disability is used as a tool of violence to enact societal oppression.

The red (#f71d20) comes from the red AIDS ribbons (1991) used to protest the societal neglect of the AIDS pandemic. HIV/AIDS was ignored by governments for years because they either didn't care - or thought it was a good thing - that massive numbers of gay, black & hemophiliac people were dying.

Similar reds are now used by the Millions Missing (2016) campaigns to advocate for research and treatment for ME/CFS, another disease which disproportionately affects disadvantaged groups (mostly women) that has been widely neglected and dismissed.

Yellow: disability caused by natural differences. Models like the affirmative model and evolutionary models which view disability as providing positive benefits to individuals and/or society.

The specific golden yellow (#FDD70A): comes from the intersex flag (2013). Intersex is an umbrella term for natural bodily variations that don't neatly conform to ideas of "male" or "female". As a result we are medicalized when there is nothing actually wrong with us. (We intersex folks also belong to the queer community because of how we threaten binary ideas about sex/gender.)

Gold also appears on the Eros Recio disability flag (2017). More recently (2018), gold has become associated with autism, another natural difference.

White: disability caused by unknown or other factors. Models like the human rights model, which focus on how disabled people - regardless of how or why they are disabled - are deserving of basic human/civil rights and liberties.

The specific white (#FFFFFF) is from the neurodiversity flag. I have been unable to track down the first one from 2005 but a large variety of rainbow infinities on white backgrounds have been used ever since for neurodiversity.

Neurodiversity is a large umbrella category, and can be caused by many factors.

Blue: situational disabilities. Models like the social model and the radical model which posit there is nothing wrong with us. The problem is how society excludes us.

The specific blue (#009ee0) comes from the Deaf flag (2011). Many Deaf people feel there is nothing wrong with being Deaf, the problem is that the rest of society does not use signed languages, provide captions & transcripts, etc.

Green: disability due to natural illness. By "natural" I mean not socially imposed like how how treatable diseases are allowed to persist due to sociopolitical oppression/neglect. This is associated with medical models of disability.

Honestly I struggled for a historical flag for green - seems green is not a colour that disabled organizers seem to have been using until very recently(?). There are a bunch of green awareness ribbons from the 00s such as for kidney cancer, mitochondrial disease, hepatits B, and lyme disease. But I could not find evidence that any of them were made by the people with the relevant disabilities.

If anybody knows of any disability-led designs that prominently feature green that were used before ~2016 please let me know!

Green has been used as a colour for mental illness since at least 2013, and judging from my google image search results for "green ribbon awareness" this has been the most popular green ribbon awareness campaign.

But everything I can find gives me the impression this green ribbon campaign was created by sane people, though some celebrities who have been open about having mental health problems have backed the campaign.

The green sunflower lanyards used to indicate hidden disabilities started in 2016 in the UK, from which I got this green (#1f9a4b).

Purple: disability as a community. Models like the social construction model which focus on how the category of disability is socially constructed and maintained.

The purple (#82609b) is from the mad pride flag (2013). Mad pride has its origin in the psychiatric survivor movement, which has been critical of how psychiatry defines and punishes madness.

Madness in particularly has a long history of being socially constructed. For example, in how sociopolitical oppression can be twisted into individual pathology: black slaves who fled slavery were diagnosed with "drapetomania" rather than for society to understand slavery as oppression. More recently, terms like "climate anxiety" and "climate grief" have been used to individualize the climate crisis.

Including purple in the place of green in the flag is as a means to include mad pride & mutual aid communities when talking disability history. The five colours of the standard disability pride flag are to symbolize all of humanity, being the most common colours used in national flags.

Swapping out the green for purple for talking about disability history kind of represents how we disabled people have been on our own, not really represented by nation-states.

[v-4-l-0-n]

“The gay flag copies the lesbian flag !!!!🥺🥺🥺” mfs when the ocean flag was based on the toothpaste flag which was based on the sunset flag which was based on the lipstick (+ butch) flag which was based on the cougar flag which was based on the bear flag which was based on the leather flag which was based on the Gilbert baker flag

[themuseumlady]

the importance of proper flag storage!

pictured above are two flag boxes - - the former, and the updated storage for a flag!

The (I am unsure of the exact dimensions but a bit bigger than 3x5 ft) flag was creased, crumpled, folded, and shoved into the tiny box a number of years ago. As we have been slowly working through out textiles collection, we came across it and immediately recognized its need for better storage.

when working to update and improve the storage for a flag, it is important to fold the flag in new places (with padding!!), to not further the harm that a crease will create over time

so happy that this flag has a new home !!

[murcielagatito]

no se olviden mis cariños! our flags are like this for a reason! the cuban flag came fist and puerto rico adopted and inverted the colors as our own in a show of solidarity and respect and shared cultures 💖🇵🇷🤝🏽🇨🇺💖

[frenchboysarehot]

Italian Flag Family Tree! Please inform me on any mistakes I've made, I put a good bit of work and effort into this, for the most part if text is beside a flag then it pertains to it, if it is under it, it does not.

[iamshawn]

The flag was designed in 1999 by American trans woman Monica Helms and is a symbol of the transgender community, organizations, and individuals. It was first shown a year later though at a pride parade in Phoenix, Arizona in 2000. Monica Helms said the following of the flag.

"The stripes at the top and bottom are light blue, the traditional color for baby boys. The stripes next to them are pink, the traditional color for baby girls. The stripe in the middle is white, for those who are transitioning or consider themselves having a neutral or undefined gender."

Respect people's pronouns please, it's not that hard.