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Excerpt from Report on Desecration of American Flag; Sons of the Revolution, Connecticut: A Report Read at the Annual Meeting of the Sons of the Revolution, December 8, 1896 The second name worthy of record in connection with the American Flag is that of Captain Samuel Chester Reid, who was born at Norwich, Conn., August 25, 1783. He went to sea at the early age of eleven years, and was captured by a French privateer, and for six months was a prisoner at Basseterre. On his release he became an active midshipman on board the United States ship, Baltimore, of Commodore Truxtun's fleet in the West Indies. On the breaking out of the War of 1812, he commanded the privateer Gen. Armstrong, with which he fought one of the most remarkable naval battles on record in the port of Fayal on September 26 and 27, 1814. His force was 7 guns and 90 men. He was attacked by the boats of the Plantagenet, 74 guns; the Rota, 44 guns, and the Carnation, 18 guns. Reid succeeded in thoroughly disabling and defeating the enemy, and finally scuttled his own vessel to prevent her capture. Reid's loss was two killed and seven wounded. This attack in a neutral port led to diplomatic correspondence, but the arbitration of Louis Napoleon decided against the Americans. The effect of this action undoubtedly gave Gen. Jackson the victory at New Orleans, for the British fleet was on its way to reinforce the British forces operating against that city. Capt. Reid was appointed a sailing master in the United States Navy and served in that capacity until his death. He was warden of the port of New York, and he invented the signal telegraph which was set up at Sandy Hook, the Narrows, and the Battery and he regulated and num bered the pilot boats running out of New York. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Desecrating the American Flag is the only comprehensive, edited, and annotated collection of critical documents regarding the controversies swirling around the desecration of the American flag. Should violators of the Stars and Stripes be prosecuted? Or legally protected? This issue reached center stage in American politics throughout the 1990s when Congress debated whether or not to amend the constitution to forbid flag desecration; but this debate has been hotly contested since the Civil War. Robert Justin Goldstein brings together almost 150 key documents spanning more than 100 years. He culls from a variety of sources—Congressional hearings, debates, legal briefs, oral arguments, newspaper articles, and court rulings, for example—and then carefully edits each document to retain key material. Introductory essays place each document within a broader historical, political, and legal context.

Immediately after capturing the Chinese capital, Nanjing, on December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers committed atrocities such as mass executions, rampant rapes, arson, and looting in and around the city. The carnage went on for weeks. On January 6, 1938, after the worst of the massacre atrocities was over, three American diplomats arrived in Nanjing. Upon their arrival, Third Secretary John Moore Allison, Vice Consul James Espy, and Code Clerk Archibald Alexander McFardyen, Jr. cabled dispatches about the atrocities and other conditions in the city to the Department of State and other U.S. diplomatic posts in China. Often, they dispatched several reports within a day. These atrocity reports, which were largely based on interviews with American missionaries and their own investigations, gave detailed descriptions of Japanese atrocities, property damage, social conditions, relief efforts, diplomatic wrestling, and many other aspects of life in the city during and after the massacre period. The value of these diplomatic dispatches and reports, which were retrieved from the national archives, rests on that they extensively document the American diplomats' role, their observations and attitude toward the situation there, their efforts to help the Chinese and protect the Americans, and their struggles with the Japanese.