Wednesday · November 11, 2026

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The events of October 21 · Read the full edition → · More from October 21 →

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A Massachusetts town raises the first flag to carry the word "liberty"

The banner still flies the King's colors, with Liberty and Union stitched across the bottom.

By October 1774, the Sons of Liberty in Taunton, Massachusetts, had already driven out the town's Loyalists, including the lawyer Daniel Leonard. On October 21, they raised a 112-foot liberty pole outside the Taunton Courthouse and Leonard's former house, flying a red ensign bearing the Union Jack with the words "Liberty and Union" sewn across the lower portion. It was the first flag raised in the colonies to carry the word "liberty," though the Union Jack still sat in its corner. The Boston Evening-Post reported the scene three days later…

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More from October 21

A sitting senator falls at Ball's Bluff; his men are driven into the Potomac

Boats swamp under the weight of fleeing soldiers as a Mississippi regiment breaks the Union line at dusk.

Wright's spiral museum opens its doors on Fifth Avenue

The architect died in April; the building he fought sixteen years to see built opened without him in October.

Eisenhower signs over the Army's rocket men; von Braun now works for NASA

The order strips most of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and hands its hardware and people to the year-old civilian space agency.

Two failed launches in September gave way to a bottle of Madeira and a long-awaited splash.

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Read the full October 21 edition →Everything that happened on October 21 →

More from Colonial America

Congress bans British trade; twelve colonies sign the Continental Association

Tea goes first, then nearly everything else Britain ships across the Atlantic.

The Congress breaks up; the colonies now have a boycott and a date to reconvene

Fifty-six delegates close seven weeks at Carpenters' Hall with a trade embargo, a petition to the king, and the promise to meet again come spring.

William Penn steps ashore at Philadelphia, a city that exists only on paper

He had landed at New Castle days earlier; now he comes to the ground he has already named for brotherly love.

Aboard the Mayflower, 41 passengers bind themselves into a "civil Body Politick"

Storms have blown the ship off its course for Virginia, and some aboard are saying that no one has the power to command them.

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