Banners of Liberty: An Exhibition of Original Revolutionary War Flags
April 19 - August 10, 2025- April 19 - August 10, 2025
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Museum of the American Revolution
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Upcoming special exhibition included in regular Museum admission.
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The aged, as well as the young, daily march out under the banners of liberty, and discover a determined resolution to maintain her cause even until death.The Pennsylvania Mercury, Philadelphia, June 9, 1775
The Museum will mark the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States Armed Forces (Army, Navy, and Marine Corps) with a new special exhibition, Banners of Liberty: An Exhibition of Original Revolutionary War Flags, opening April 19, 2025. The exhibition, which will be displayed in the Museum's first-floor Patriots Gallery, will feature the largest gathering of rare and significant Revolutionary War flags in more than two centuries.
Armies and navies in the 1700s employed artistically embellished flags to identify their armed forces on land and sea, to aid in maneuvers, and to instill "esprit de corps" within military units. Flag makers, including Philadelphia’s Rebecca Flower Young and Elizabeth “Betsy” Ross, employed colors and designs to represent national identity and political ideals. For America’s Revolutionary generation, the flags that flew over their regiments and ships were perhaps the first visual expressions of liberty and independence that they saw.
Of the hundreds of flags made and carried in the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), only about 30 are known to survive. Working with institutional and private lenders, the Museum will assemble and display more than a dozen original flags that were carried by Continental Army and American militia units in military campaigns stretching from northern New England to South Carolina.
Key Flags to be Displayed
Banners of Liberty will be the culmination of a series of popular special exhibitions and public programs that have explored the history of the American flag, including A New Constellation: A Collection of 13-Star Flags (2019), the True Colours Flag Project (2021), and Flags and Founding Documents, 1776-Today (2021). The Museum is honored to kick off the nation’s 250th anniversary in the Revolutionary capital with this unprecedented exhibition of rare and dramatic "banners of liberty."
Painting in exhibit graphic: Howard Pyle (1853-1911), The Nation Makers, ca. 1902, oil on canvas, 40 ¼ x 26 in. Brandywine Museum of Art, Purchased through a grant from the Mabel Pew Myrin Trust, 1984.
Support for Banners of Liberty has been made possible by Rosalind and Mark Shenkman, Nancy and Morris W. Offit, and Jeff Bridgman.