HISTORICAL USA FLAGS

In its beginnings, the United States consisted only of the Thirteen Colonies, which consisted of states occupying the same lands as when they were British colonies. American colonists fought off their British rulers in the American Revolutionary War of the 1770s and issued a Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was fought between the United States of America and eleven Southern slave states known as the Confederate States of America. The outlying states of Alaska and Hawaii were both admitted in 1959.