…but let’s talk about Betsy Ross.
According to James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Professor Michael Frisch at SUNY Buffalo asks his first-year college students to list “the first ten names that you think of” in American History before the Civil War. (He excludes presidents, generals, etc.) Betsy Ross led the list seven years out of eight.
Here’s reality according to Loewen: Betsy Ross played no part in the actual creation of the first American flag. As he puts it, “Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Phildadelphia, largely invented the myth of the first flag.”
Flag Day (June 14) commemorates the date in 1777 when the Continental Congress approved the design for a national flag.
However, according to my very own official younger daughter Emily, who—with her sister—has written about Betsy Ross, “She may have just had good PR, but my recent research did seem to lead me to believe that Betsy Ross did standardize the five-pointed star for use on the American flag. Until she made her flags, the stars were sometimes six pointed. Ross used the five points because she could cut it out quickly by folding the material and only making one cut. After her flags, the five-pointed star was used on other American flags.”