On June 23, 1945, a convoy of U.S. military personnel entered Berlin, Germany, to confer with Russian authorities and establish control of the American sector of the jointly occupied city. Forty-eight-star U.S. flags, handmade in the nearby town of Halle, were specially ordered for the convoy vehicles. Colonel John J. Maginnis, a field officer involved with the U.S. Army’s military government operations, kept one of these flags and framed it as a souvenir of the historic event.

With the end of World War II, the American flag came to symbolize the new roles and responsibilities the nation would undertake as a world power: helping to rebuild postwar Europe, forming alliances aimed at curbing future aggression, and fighting a “cold war” against the spread of communism.