The Flag Heritage Foundation sold the Forster Flag in April 2014, and is applying the proceeds of the sale to fund the Flag Heritage Fund at the University of Texas. This gift will allow the Flag Research Center’s vast collection of books, pamphlets, files, papers and documentation about flags, their history and meaning to find a permanent home at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University’s flagship campus in Austin. This collection, assembled over many decades by Dr. Whitney Smith, the foremost scholar in the field, is the greatest of its kind in the world, and we hope and expect that it will form the nucleus of a great public center for study and scholarship.
Information about the development of the Whitney Smith Flag Research Center Library at the University of Texas, and about the Flag Heritage Fund, will be posted here as circumstances warrant.
Whitney Smith Flag Research Collection Donation
July 14, 2014
The Flag Heritage Foundation has given $250,000 to establish the Whitney Smith Flag Research Collection at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. This Collection has as its nucleus the matchless library of Dr. Whitney Smith’s legendary Flag Research Center in Winchester, Massachusetts, which with the Foundation’s help was transferred to the University on Dr. Smith’s retirement and is now publicly available to scholars for the first time. It is hoped and expected that the Collection, in its new home at Austin, will develop into a world center for research into flags, symbolic expression, and state and political symbolism, and will attract further donations of research material by scholars and collectors in the years to come.
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