The Canadian flag dates from 1965. Yes, flags change often, and there have been more recent changes; it's just that it usually takes a big political upheaval like in South Africa or Russia for this to happen. By contrast, the Maple Leaf Flag came out of Prime Minister Lester B Pearson's idea to placate growing French-Canadian nationalism in the province of Quebec, where also much of his party's base was, with a more distinctively Canadian design and organized a committee to work on the project. (Before this, Canada's official flag was the Union Jack, but the Canadian Red Ensign — a red flag with the Union Jack in the upper left corner and the shield from Canada's coat of arms on the right — was widely used as a distinctive flag.) The Canadian flag is so familiar it's a surprise to learn how recent it is compared to others (for example the Australian flag is a 1901 design, give or take minor details).
The Canadian flag can borrow much of its apparent "tradition" from the fact that it is primarily based on the flag of the Royal Military College of Canada (in Kingston). As well, the Maple Leaf is an old symbol in Canada, used by French Canadians as well as used in the English Canadian poem "The Maple Leaf Forever" (both versions). Put two familiar ideas together, you get a new flag that seems much older and more traditional!
This disconnect is so well-known that an Urban Legend sprang up that the Canadian currency of the '80s had American flags on the Parliament buildings in its art; those are the Red Ensign.
The desire to create a new Canadian flag that didn't have a British symbol like the Red Ensign came out of the Canadian involvement in peacekeeping after the Suez Crisis, in 1956, as the British were among the participants in that conflict and the Canadian peacekeepers did not like being seen as partial to the British side.
Similarly, the Cornish flag (Saint Piran's Flag) is not recorded as a symbol of Cornwall before 1838.
The American flag had forty-eight stars up to 1959; the 49th and 50th stars weren't added until 1960.
Given that each star represents a state in the union, this trend will happen again when the United States gains a new state (in fact, a flag with fifty-one stars has already been approved... now we just need to find the right State). The new flag is traditionally issued on the 4th of July following the new state's admission into the Union.
The Union Flag (Jack) of the United Kingdom lacked its red saltire until Ireland and Britain were joined in 1801.
The flag of Wales dates back to the late 15th century, but it wasn't officially adopted as its national flag until as recently as 1959.
East Asian countries like China, Japan and Korea did not have national flags for most of their millennia-long history. It was in the late 1800s that increased exposure to European ships flying flags caused them to think, "Hey, maybe we should make up flags for our countries so that they can't defeat us with the cunning use of flags." Moreover, China's current flag was invented by Mao's communist regime in 1949. Taiwan currently adopts its old flag.
Before 1949, the Chinese Communists used a variant of the international communist flag, with a hammer and a sickle on a red field.
Japan's flag, while an image that dates back to at least the 7th century and accepted as a civil ensign in 1870, wasn't legally adopted as the country's national flag until 1999.
The idea of "national flags" at all only became a serious idea around the turn of the 19th century! This was due to the American and French Revolutions and was because the very idea of a "nation" did not exist, at least as we know it. Humanity was organized into kingdoms, bound not to some abstract idea of a nation, but by loyalty to a royal family. This is not to say the idea of ethnicity did not exist; just that your ethnicity had nothing to do with who you owed your loyalty to. There might have been royal standards, naval ensigns, or battle flags, but these were not "national" flags, and did not represent the nation outside of their individual contexts. In modern portrayals of historical settings, these banners may be retroactively used to represent nations, but they were not used that way at the time.
Miscellaneous
Old Navy has no connection with the Navy, nor is it especially old. It was established as a discount version of Gap in 1993, called Gap Warehouse, but then rebranded as Old Navy in 1994.
I and J became separate letters in the 16th century.
So did U and V around the same time.
And as late as the turn of the 19th to 20th century, I and J were still to some extent treated as variants of one letter. This is the reason there's no J Street in Washington, DC.
For that matter, W only dates back a few centuries, as well. It was originally represented by using two Vs (which were also Us at the time) in a row, hence its name.
W became a separate letter of the Swedish alphabet in 2006.
The idea of "Judeo-Christian" values or ideals is recent and dates to the Cold War era. Throughout most of the 2000-year history of Christianity, Jews and Christians were mostly at loggerheads with each other and Jews were frequently marginalized and persecuted in Christian countries. Although Christians and Jews do share many books in the Old Testament, the idea of the two religions having a lot in common, or of Christians and Jews working together for some societal good, would have been unthinkable to most Christians and Jews prior to the 20th century.
Although tumbleweed is seen as emblematic of the Wild West, it's a Eurasian plant (genus Salsola) and wasn't recorded in the U.S. until 1877 — long after the setting of many westerns.
A lot of cities that suffered recent wars have their historic buildings destroyed which were only recently restored. The famed Osaka Castle? Rebuilt in the seventies with concrete after multiple destructions. The bulk of the Gyeongbok Palace complex in Seoul was constructed in the '90s. A more extreme example is the Fraunkirche of Dresden, completely restored in 2006.
The Palace of Bavaria in Munich is still undergoing restoration from the damages it sustained in WWII and the expected completion of the restoration is expected to last until 2040! In fact, apart from three buildings all of pre-WWII Munich is no longer extant (The Allies used the four tallest buildings as guidance markers for their bombs, so never dropped them there. The fourth was destroyed towards the end of the war when it was struck by a plane.). Thanks to meticulous note taking at Hitler's orders (Hitler ordered the documentation for restoration purposes prior to WWII, figuring that bombing Munich would have significant symbolic implications, being the place where the Nazi party was born) the allies were able to help restore the city to a identical pre-War look.
The classic Saw a Woman in Half magic trick performed in the Victorian or Edwardian era, or even earlier? Nope. It was invented in 1921 by one Percy J. Selbit, and when he debuted it at the Finsbury Park Empire theatre in London, it had a strong element of Grand Guignol, with buckets of fake blood and a very drawn out and realistic spine-sawing effect. It was then figured out, copied, and given a more family-friendly presentation by other magicians on the other side of the Atlantic that same year.
Children were not exactly encouraged to "read, read, read" until sometime after the advent of television. Of course, before the television (or even the radio) was invented, reading was the primary source of entertainment. Parents viewed "excessive reading" to be a much bigger issue than "not reading enough" (see the classic The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last"). While "excessive reading" is still a concern for some parents today, it takes a backseat to the issues of "too much television" or "too much video games".
The attitude of crying as being "shameful" or "a sign of weakness" only became common within the past few centuries. Before that, grieving openly was more accepted than it is today. While there is a general attitude today that crying is healthy for you, people are still expected to be restrained in expressing their emotions. For example, people who wail loudly in public today may be thought of as having severe emotional problems—but a few centuries ago, that was quite common.
The related idea that Men Don't Cry (specifically the iteration where they're not supposed to cry period) is even more recent. When crying started to be seen more negatively, men in particular were encouraged to restrain their emotional reactions, but there was still an understanding that men had emotions and that crying was an appropriate response in certain situations, like after enduring a severe trauma or when grieving (in fact, works from that era will often use Manly Tears strategically as a way of indicating that a situation is emotionally charged). It's not until near the end of the 20th century that we really start to see the idea that men aren't supposed to cry at all ever taking hold.
The first children's playground slide was opened to the public on 18 April 1922 (by one Charles Wicksteed in his hometown of Kettering, England). While the basic concept was much older (e.g., fairground helter-skelters), these required users to slide on mats, which in turn required an attendant — Wicksteed's polished slide required only the clothes that the children wore and could be used unattended (although not usually unsupervised).
Depending on which reports you want to believe, the first Pope whose election was signalled by white smoke from the Vatican chimney was either Pius IX (1846) or Benedict XV (1914). Either way, it's not the centuries-old tradition that most people assume it to be.
Even the title 'Pope' itself is newer than people think. The word means 'father' — the title of all Catholic priests but wasn't reserved for the man we would now consider to the Pope until medieval times.
Furthermore, most listed Popes from the Dark Ages or earlier have been retrospectively declared popes and were not popes in the modern sense. The leadership of the Church was often unclear, and the Bishops of Rome were often challenged by the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch (although Arab conquests of Egypt and Syria made the latter two impotent early). It took centuries of maneuvering and precedent-setting for Rome to be the undisputed seat of leadership of the church. On top of that, many of earliest 'popes' were not even Bishops of Rome as such, just considered by scholars to have been the most important Christians in Rome in the surrounding area to give the image of direct descent from Saint Peter.
Gregory the First, who began his reign in 590 AD, is the first to hold the full authority of the Papacy.
Another issue to consider is that one of the claims to the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome is based upon being the successor of Peter the Apostle, but how does one resolve this in light of that Peter was the first Bishop of Antioch previous to being the first Bishop of Rome?
Not to mention, papal infallibility has only been the official teaching of the Catholic Church since 1869. And it barely got the required vote.
The papacy only started using white and gold in 1808. Prior to that, the papal colors were red and gold.
The Fisherman's Ring dates from 1265.
Conclaves themselves only date from 1059.
The triple tiara dates from the 14th century.
The custom of the Pope kissing the ground on arriving in a country for the first time originates with Pope John Paul II. And Popes rarely travelled at all before Pope Paul VI (r. 1963-78). Prior to him, no pope had ever left Europe, even to visit the Holy Land; popes were generally old men unfit for long and dangerous travels, and their high status meant that people came to them.
Two elements ubiquitous in stories set in the "Arabian Nights" Days, scimitar swords and crescent standards, are surprisingly neither ancient nor Arabian in origin. Scimitars originated in Central Asia and were introduced to the Middle East by Turkic people centuries after Islam took hold in the region, while the crescent as a symbol of Islam was first used in North Africa in the 14th century (the accompanying star is even newer, as detailed in Laws and Politics above). If you were to Time Travel to the ancient period of Islamic expansion or even The Crusades, you'd be surprised to find the Muslim armies using broadswords and waving plain green, white, and black banners.
The smiley face – two dots and an arc – cannot be proven to have existed before the late 1940s; it was popularized in 1967 by artist George Tenagi, who created it for an ad campaign for the University Federal Savings & Loan in Seattle. In 1970, merchandise with the face started appearing, and it quickly became a phenomenon.
Likewise, the emoticon dates no further back than the late 1940s, when they were used in sci-fi fandoms; they were popularized in 1982 by student Scott Fahlman on the Carnegie Mellon University BBS, from which they spread to the rest of the early internet.
The concept of the office cubicle dates back to the 1968 debut of the "Action Office II" design collection (technically it had been developed for the original collection released in 1963, but that wasn't successful), and it took less than two decades for businesses to turn them into workplace hell by shrinking them to the point they could no longer be reconfigured or customized as needed by their users.
Hot-desking became prevalent in the 1990s as big businesses increasingly found themselves with not enough office space for all their staff to work. Similarly, open-plan offices came into vogue in the mid-aughts as a backlash against densely-packed, characterless workplaces.
The "move out when you are an adult" philosophy is a (relatively) recent phenomenon of post-WWII America where many people, particularly men, had four complete years of constant work, savings (due to wartime rationing meaning there were fewer things to spend money on), and GI Bill benefits that helped them afford to house. Prior to that, most people lived in family units and only moved away when there wasn't enough room in the current dwelling.
Similarly, the habit of people placing their elderly parents in nursing homes. Until recently, aging parents who could no longer care for themselves were usually cared for at home by their adult children. It also doesn't seem to be a widespread practice outside of the US.
Bullfighting was not invented by the Cretans, the ancient Iberians, or the Romans. It originated in the Late Middle Ages as a version of jousting in which a mounted lancer (or lancers) faced a bull instead of each other (this is where modern rejoneadores◊ and picadores◊ come from). Once the bull was left more dead than alive and the lancers had shown their skill, the public was allowed to jump into the arena and kill, butcher, and take the bull's meat home (which is why bullfights were — and are — performed during holidays; it was never meant to be a contest between man and animal but a form of ritualized slaughter, and for many people, it would be the only time they'd get to eat beef, courtesy of those very same lancers, who were aristocratic ranchers).
Typical bullfighters (on foot) arose and started to displace the lancers in the early to the mid-18th century. Not coincidentally, this was the same time the new Bourbon dynasty attempted to ban bullfighting repeatedly. This is the reason bullfighters still wear 18th-century-looking suits and are called matadors, which means literally "killers". In the beginning, they were private challengers, and the ones who faced the less injured bulls before killing them earned more fame and money for themselves. Bullfighting became then less of an aristocratic pastime and more of a way for poor men to become rich celebrities if they did not die in the attempt.
Ironically, it was the French invaders in the early 19th century who promoted bullfighting the most, as a cheap attempt to gain popular support by bringing something that the Spanish monarchy had persecuted and banned repeatedly. Once reinstated, the Spanish monarchy made a U-turn and imitated this policy through the 19th century, giving birth to the satirist moniker "Pan y Toros" ("Bread and Bulls", a pun on the Romans' Panem et Circenses). The Napoleonic armies also introduced bullfighting in southern France, although it only really took off there under the reign of Napoleon III, whose wife was Spanish.
The oldest bullrings are from the second half of the 18th century, and most weren't built until the 19th or even the early 20th century when bullfighting was already a tourist attraction. The oldest extant bullring is that of Aranjuez, completed in 1760. Before they were invented, corridas were done in town squares that were barricaded for the occasion. Therefore, the Spanish name for a bullring is plaza de toros ("bulls' square").
Picadores did not wear protection before the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), when a law was passed to that effect.
In Great Britain, celebrating New Year's Day was long seen as a quirky Scottish tradition; in England, it was just a normal winter day. Unexpectedly, it became a public holiday in 1974, and almost immediately the English took to it enthusiastically. It's been suggested that the decision to make it a holiday was due to the energy crisis since 1 January 1974 happened to be the day that the Three Day Week went into effect. By having an extra day off, people would use less energy and it might also ease some of the tension happening in the country at the time.
Although the New Year's Eve ball drop in New York Times Square dates to 1907, the tradition of counting down the seconds to midnight only began in 1979.
The Romani people did not begin living in elaborate wagons until the 1850s, and even then, they weren't used outside of Britain. Prior to this, they used tents.
US bank Wells Fargo bills itself as being founded in 1852, and its brand identity frequently calls back to its roots of stagecoaches traversing the American West loaded with gold. While this isn't exactly false, inasmuch as there really was a Wells Fargo company founded in 1852 that started as a delivery and financial services firm on the West Coastnote Founded, incidentally, by two of the three original people who established American Express on the East Coast after the third partner objected to expanding AmEx's operations to San Francisco that later turned into a bank, its relationship to the current bank is more complex. The company that currently exists as Wells Fargo was founded as the Norwest Corporation in 1929 in Minnesota; in 1998 it bought out the original Wells Fargo—at the time, a regional bank in California—to establish a West Coast presence. Norwest then decided to take on the Wells Fargo name to acquire a catchier name and backstory (though they did lean into this a little further by moving their HQ to San Francisco).
Fan conventions for most cult genres such as Comic Books, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, only go back to The '70s at the earliest. Prior to that, most gatherings that may have called themselves comic book or sci-fi conventions were primarily networking events attended mostly by professionals in the business such as writers or artists. Even the concept of "dealers' rooms" or vendors' merchandise alleys hadn't been born yet as at the time, there were very few wares to sell. And there were no cosplay or celebrity appearances/autograph sessions. The tone of these events was very much like a typical business convention/symposium with seminars, workshops, and lectures, many of which occurred in individuals' hotel rooms with a half dozen participants, instead of huge auditoriums with audiences of hundreds. They were very low-key events that lacked any of the fanfare and hype of San Diego or New York Comicon or Atlanta's Dragoncon. In fact, in these early years, such conventions may have occurred in hotels without any of the non-convention guests even noticing. Non-pros were not unwelcomed but they might have found those early cons dry and boring, the average attendees being somewhere over forty, White, and 98% male. There was little to no mention of multimedia sci-fi (TV shows and films), the central focus being literary science fiction and their authors, with many authors being snobbishly dismissive of Star Trek and any other than existing genre multimedia. Typical "non-pro" fans attending these early conventions were very "hardcore" enthusiasts who may or may not have been aspiring professional writers.note It could be argued that there were very few "casual" SF fans in the era prior to Star Wars, since literary SF was more prevalent than multimedia SF; The pickings were limited to Star Trek TOS reruns, a handful of critically acclaimed films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and mostly little remembered, short-lived, low budget TV series of varying quality (and mostly aimed towards younger audiences anyway) Science Fiction conventions originally served as gatherings for peer to peer networking, collaboration, and professional development, not an outlet for fans to fly their freak flags. Also, "comic book" and "science fiction" conventions usually were separate entities in the days before dealers' rooms. The change would not really come full circle until the mid to late 1990s when these events would be marketed as "festivals" instead of "conventions" and aiming to attract casual fans of all ages (and genders) in masses while more hardcore fans and professionals networked behind the scenes.
Showering daily did not become the norm until the 1940s. Prior to this, bathing was a luxury that most people afforded once or twice a week, while daily ablutions would be done at the bathroom sink.
While color TVs were no longer a luxury by the late 1970s, black and white TVs were still being manufactured and sold into the early ‘90s, for niche markets like prisons and CCTV security systems.
The whole concept of Heaven and Hell being in Another Dimension is far more recent than most people think. Most ancient people thought Heaven literally was in the sky/space (Hence the Fluffy Cloud Heaven trope) and Hell was underground (or at the center of the Earth). Even though some religious literature as late as the 19th century depicts this, the whole idea of Heaven and Hell being other dimensions didn't really catch on until the 20th century, when people started being able to explore the sky, and later space, thanks to various technological advances.
The whole idea of the nuclear family (i.e. a mom, dad, and some kids) that many self-proclaimed "traditionalists" champion is only a few centuries old. A real "traditional family" would be a medieval-style family, where the entire extended family lives together either on a farm or in a castle, depending on if they're peasants or royalty. For most of history, the "family" would also have been considered to include servants and staff, tenants, and any other people who were socially or financially dependent on the head of the household. The stereotypical "Mafia family" is a surviving (and admittedly extreme form) of this style of family, but it would have been the style of family when The Mafia started out.
While the United States Postal Service has had its roots reach as far back as 1775, the independent government agency as we know it today was only formed in 1971.
The ubiquitous arrow symbol to indicate things or directions dates to the late 19th century. Before that, skeuomorphic images of pointing hands called "manicules" were used.
Amusement ride examples.
The now iconic log flume ride was only invented in 1963.
The first modern coaster to go upside down dates to 1975, and the first modern coaster with a vertical loop, dates to a year later in 1976.
Yoga as exercise dates to the 1920s at the earliest and has pretty much nothing to do with any prior yoga traditions. In fact, most of the postures associated with yoga exercises were borrowed from Western gymnastics.
It's easy to assume that cadence calls have been part of American military culture forever, but they only really date to the latter days of World War II, when African American soldiers introduced long-entrenched traditions like the Call-and-Response Song and work songs into drills and others enthusiastically noticed the idea. "Sound Off" itself was originated by Georgia-born Pvt. Willie Lee Duckworth during a May 1944 march at Fort Slocum, outside New York City, and quickly spread throughout the service, even getting recorded and pressed onto an official vinyl record so that other squadrons could learn it.
The pink ribbon was first used to symbolize breast cancer awareness for a 1992 Self magazine ad campaign
The division of the books of The Bible. While verses are often obvious, chapters by no means are. A much older division is the Weekly Portions of Torah, where all five books are read over the course of a year (three years in some communities) in the synagogue. While that appears to date back to the banishment of Babel (as do the synagogues themselves), chapters were invented by the Christians in the Middle Ages and adopted from them by the Jews. The New Testament only started getting versified in the 13th century, and the standard chapter-and-verse divisions used today are based on the 1551 edition by French printer Robert Estienne.
While Mother's Day has been widely observed in the US since World War I, Father's Day was only popularized in 1972 following Richard Nixon declaring it a national holiday.
The London Underground is famous for being the oldest subway and urban railway in the world. This is partially true in that its oldest section dates back to 1863, but the underground railways of London during this time were often little more than competing commuter railways with few organizational or practical connections to each other. The idea of combining these together into a cohesive rapid transit network didn't happen until 1902 and the founding of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. That company introduced the "Underground" name to describe its network, but it took until the 1930s for it to actually become its official designation.
Stock prices in the US weren't quoted in dollars and cents until 2001.note The transition to decimal pricing started in 2000, but wasn't completed until 2001. Before then, they were quoted in dollars and fractional dollars; the standard increment was 1/16, but for more valuable stocks 1/8 was standard, and even smaller fractional powers of 2 were employed for less valuable stocks. Canada changed to decimal pricing only 5 years earlier, in 1996. By contrast, France had used decimal pricing for literally centuries, and the UK had done so for several decades.
People tend to think of reptiles as ancient, and view the surviving groups as being as old as non-avian dinosaurs. While that is true for crocodiles, turtles, and lizards, snakes (who are just a subgroup of lizards) didn’t show up in the fossil record until the Upper Cretaceous, with the first confirmed snakes being dated to just 95 million years ago (with possible earlier types showing up 100-110 mya), and it took them a while to become fully legless, while the first mammals showed up around the same time as the dinosaurs during the Late Triassic, and birds branched off from the non-avian dinosaurs during the end of the Jurassic! Similarly, while gigantic crocodiles (like Sarcosuchus and Deinosuchus) and turtles (like Archelon) coexisted with the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous, snakes from the time would have been lucky to reach 12 feet (which is fairly common and often surpassed by living constrictors), and the first gigantic snakes like Titanoboa only showed up during the early Cenozoic, after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Smoking tobacco wasn't popularly regarded as an unhealthy vice (on par with alcohol) until the 1950s, and its associated health risks didn't become universally accepted until the 1990s. Up until that point, it was generally seen as a neutral habit, with tobacco companies continuing to market cigarettes for their supposed health benefits well into the 1960s. The Surgeon General of the United States first officially recognized cigarettes as a contributor to lung cancer in 1957, eventually leading to cigarette advertisements being banned from American television in 1970, and the Surgeon General's printed health warnings on tobacco products becoming mandatory in 1984. As late as 1994 (during the Congressional hearings leading up to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement of 1998), the CEOs of numerous major tobacco companies were still publicly claiming that nicotine wasn't even addictive.
The American Lung Association was founded in 1904 but has only had that name since 1973. It was originally the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, then the National Tuberculosis Association, then the National Tuberculosis and Respiratory Disease Association.
Some Wikipedia articles were created surprisingly recently, previously being relegated to sections within other articles:
The "pivotal event in world history" that was the fall of the Berlin Wall didn't have its own article until September 2019, before which it was just a section in the Berlin Wall article.
The Pride Month article was created in October 2022, previously just being a section within LGBT pride. Meanwhile, Wrath Month, a term coined on Twitter in 2018 in analogy to Pride Month, had an article a few months before this.
While Mardi Gras traditions in New Orleans ultimately stem from French roots, they didn't really start solidifying until the mid-1800s, i.e., long after Louisiana became part of the United States. The "traditional" Mardi Gras colors of purple, green and gold were chosen from scratch in 1872 by the inaugural king of the Krewe of Rex, apparently because he thought they looked good together. The participation of the African-American community in the then-segregated celebrations didn't really get ramped up until the Zulu parade was founded in 1909.
Only a few big city American newspapers had full-time film critics on staff until The '60s. Most other papers would just mention what films were playing as part of their entertainment coverage, without reviewing them (or sometimes just reprint reviews from the papers who had critics). The event that really revolutionized the film critic as an important part of a newspaper staff was Judith Crist's review of Spencer's Mountain (the Delmer Daves-directed film starring Henry Fonda that was the forerunner to The Waltons) in the New York Herald Tribune in 1963. Crist took on the role of Caustic Critic with gusto, tearing the film apart for "its smirking sexuality, its glorification of the vulgar, its patronizing tone toward the humble, its mealymouthed piety," adding that "it makes the nudie shows at the Rialto look like Walt Disney productions." The film's studio, Warner Bros., angrily pulled its advertising from the paper, but the paper stood by her, and the Streisand Effect helped boost Crist's profile. Warner eventually backed off and started advertising in the paper again. Other papers, realizing that opinionated reviewers could boost readership, started adding them.
Mrs. Claus was added to the lore about Santa Claus in the 1850s and had numerous pop culture appearances in the century afterward, but only really became popular in The '60s, apparently spurred on by the 1963 Phyllis McGinley storybook How Mrs. Santa Claus Saved Christmas. Bizarrely, the earliest depiction of Mrs. Claus as a character in a live action audio-visual production was in the notoriously cheesy 1964 film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (she also appeared in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in the same year).
Cardiff only became the capital of Wales until 1955; before then, there was no definite Welsh capital city.
— a red flag with the Union Jack in the upper left corner and the shield from Canada's coat of arms on the right — was widely used as a distinctive flag.) The Canadian flag is so familiar it's a surprise to learn how recent it is compared to others (for example the Australian flag is a 1901 design, give or take minor details).
