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The sun and the lion have been competing symbols of Macedonia for centuries. This is seen especially during the choosing of symbols for the coat of arms and flag of the (Peoples/Socialist) Republic of Macedonia. This book shows the history of these symbols and explains the process of choosing the symbols for the flag and coat of arms, including their many changes and the efforts to devise a coat of arms in heraldic form. Today the sun appears in the national coat of arms and on the flag, as well as in the national anthem. Its popularity as a national symbol is also seen in Macedonian municipal coats of arms, where it is the most frequent charge.

The lead article, by David F. Phillips, presents a new, blazon-based approach to Japanese mōn. Also provided are a preface, a literature review, English blazons of daimyō flags, and a new glossary of English blazon for Japanese heraldry. The book also contains well-illustrated articles by Emmanuel Valerio and Nozomi Kariyasu on Japanese heraldic flags of the samurai period and the present day.

Practitioners of vexillology have long worked to apply modern historical techniques and research methods to professionalize this study, once approached mainly through narrative and anecdotal methods. Vexillology is a useful auxiliary to history, political science, sociology, semiology, and design – but is it a social science of its own rather than a mere adjunct to more traditional fields? Many years of scholarly debate have not settled this question. In this excerpt from his PhD thesis at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, made available for the first time in English by the Flag Heritage Foundation, Dr. Željko Heimer reviews the arguments and evidence and offers a reasoned conclusion in support of vexillology as a social science.

Pedro Julio Dousdebés (1883-1954) was a general in the Colombian army. In 1937 he published a document-based history of the flags and emblems of Colombia from colonial days forward. His work was published in Spanish in the bulletin of the Colombian Academy of History. Working from an original in the Whitney Smith Flag Research Center Collection at the University of Texas, the Flag Heritage Foundation commissioned a translation by Michael F. Hammer. It is published here with all its original color plates, plus a preface and a historical introduction by David F. Phillips, a commentary by Gustavo Tracchia, four maps, 183 footnotes, and 20 additional illustrations in color and 24 in black and white. It is the first book on this subject in English.

This reproduces an undated pamphlet published in London in the 1830s. The illustrations are in roughly their original size; in the original they were connected side-to-side in accordion format. The original from which the reprint was made was found in the Whitney Smith Flag Research Center Collection at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

An eagle with two heads was one of the most famous political symbols in Europe for hundreds of years. It was the emblem of the Holy Roman Empire, and later of the Austrian and Russian Empires, and is still in use in Balkan countries and in the Greek Orthodox Church. The importance of the double eagle in so many places, as a royal and later as a national symbol as well as a focus of nationalism and loyalty, has kept this strange image prominent for centuries in the imagination, and in the collective unconscious, of people in many nations, and has figured in such incidents of sovereignty as coins, seals, flags, regalia and military uniforms, but also in civil arts and handicrafts in many media.

What was the design of the “original” Haitian flag? What exactly were its origins and the circumstances of its adoption? What flags were actually used in the revolutionary years leading to General Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ proclamation of the Republic in 1804? This study by the Haitian scholar and educator Odette Roy Fombrun explores these questions, symbolically significant in Haitian society and long the subject of debate, in light of the historical record. She quotes extensively from eyewitness sources and later historical accounts published only in French and long out of print.

The British Indian Empire dissolved in 1947 included hundreds of indigenous states, but their state emblems (often the main element in Indian state and royal flags) have still not been collected and published. In this book David F. Phillips presents an analysis and classification of the emblems of the Indian states, based on original research into official patterns found on Indian state revenue stamps. It is the first such systematic study ever published.

This monograph on the history of the Estonian flag, by an Estonian scholar, was first published in Toronto in 1984. It traces the blue-black-white tricolor from its origins in 1884 until the eclipse of independence in 1940. An English translation of the text was commissioned by the Flag Heritage Foundation and published in 2010. The new edition also contains a never-before-published account of the author’s theft of the original (1884) Estonian tricolor from the National Museum in 1940, to keep it from the invading Russians, and his subsequent return of the flag to the nation in 1991, after the restoration of Estonian independence.

In the mid-twentieth century scholars in the United States began to examine American society through the lens of civil religion, a term first coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century. Although much of the discussion focused on civil religion in the US, other scholars began to recognise that a civil religion also existed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. While American civil religion developed organically within all strata of society, it can be argued that in the Soviet Union there was a deliberate strategy to use civil religion as a tool to replace established religion, and to create a single sense of Soviet identity among a geographically-dispersed and ethnically-diverse population. Most studies on Soviet civil religion have focused on communist rites and rituals, and the 'cult' of Lenin. Few scholars have examined the elaborate system of symbols that were essential to reinforcing Soviet civil religion so that it became an everyday aspect of life in the USSR. This thesis seeks to fill that gap by examining the simvolika, or set of symbols, of the Soviet Union. While the official state symbols included the Soviet flag, state emblem, and national anthem, the set of symbols that were vital to the practice of Soviet civil religion was much more extensive. This study will examine the usage of an array of flags, seals, symbolic elements, imagery, and motifs that were essential to the socialisation of children and the reinforcement of Soviet civil religion in adulthood. Finally, it will examine the symbolic legacies of the USSR in the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union "An adaptation of the doctoral thesis in history submitted as part of the requirements for the PhD degree at the University of Leicester (UK), 2021".,