Few symbols hold the gravity and inspiration of the American flag. It has encouraged heroics in trying times, soothed the nation after tremendous trauma, brightened the eyes of citizens, and offers comfort and hope.

Beginning with the flag’s earliest incarnation, a banner of alternating red and white stripes that hung on Boston’s Liberty Tree years before there was a United States, Old Glory tells an intertwined story of fifty flags and fifty milestone moments that, woven together, create a unique portrait of the nation’s history and the flag that represents it.

There’s the Betsy Ross flag, of course. The country’s first official ensign, its arrangement of stars and stripes became the template for flags to follow, though the story of how it came about may be more legend than fact. There’s the massive garrison flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 and inspired what would soon be known as “The Star- Spangled Banner.” How massive? Each star was two feet in diameter.

Again and again, we explore the symbiosis of the flag and history: The flag that cradled the dying Lincoln. A suffragette flag with just four stars, representing the first four states that gave women the power to vote. The flag that the crew of Apollo 11 planted on the moon. The flag raised at Ground Zero. And flags in pop culture, from Wonder Woman’s costume to Jasper Johns’s breakthrough paintings to the flag’s use as a motif throughout Easy Rider.

For over 250 years the flag has stood as a symbol of democracy and freedom, a way to express America’s ideals, an image to rally around. These fifty profiles of flags through history are one more way to understand and celebrate the grand and complicated experiment that is the United States.