At first glance, Dover's flag looks like any other administrative crest: a seal, inscriptions, a serious blue that evokes meeting rooms. Yet this small capital lived a moment that changed the country.
On December 7, 1787, in a Dover tavern, Delaware ratified the United States Constitution. It was the first of the thirteen states to do so, earning forever its nickname: the First State. Before the skyscrapers and the highways, America began to exist on this patch of prairie, around The Green, the colonial square that still anchors the town.
Its greatest institution is not a monument but Dover Air Force Base, through which America's fallen soldiers return home.
The flag tells none of this. It flies, quiet and official, above a city that was the first to say yes to America, and has preferred, ever since, to work in silence.