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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

Coddington founds Newport; a new settlement opens on Aquidneck Island for those driven out by the Antinomian Controversy

The colony takes shape as Coddington plants a settlement built around the promise of religious freedom in Rhode Island.

Twelve colonies convene in Philadelphia; no army, no treasury, a war already begun

Delegates gather at the Pennsylvania State House three weeks after Lexington and Concord, with no authority from the Crown and no clear path forward.

Allen and Arnold take Ticonderoga; not a shot is fired

83 Green Mountain Boys cross Lake Champlain before dawn and walk out with a British fort's entire stockpile of heavy artillery.

Providence men row out at night and burn HMS Gaspee to the waterline

Eighteen boatloads led by Abraham Whipple and merchant John Brown board the grounded revenue schooner in Narragansett Bay; Lieutenant Duddingston is shot and wounded.

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