Via
Hyperallergic, we’re treated to a gallery of submissions for the radical redesign of the US flag in 1958 in order to accommodate and highlight the incorporation of
Hawaii and
Alaska as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states as by President Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps as a symbolic end to America’s imperial aspirations—having gone from sea to shining sea and then some.
More than three-thousand entries, some variations on the same theme and others highly abstract, hopeful, patriotic and provocative, came in at the time and though the bulk has gone unseen since examined, considered and dismissed by the jurors, all the designs have been conserved in the archives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. A new coffee-table book has collected some of the best of them for your consideration. Check out the link up top for more information and alternate flags.
