A light blue field, a golden seal at its center, a Latin motto on a ribbon: *Sicut patribus, sit Deus nobis*, "As God was with our fathers, so may He be with us." Boston's flag looks back to 1630, to John Winthrop's Puritans who came to build their "city upon a hill." But it shows nothing of the city that invented the American art of the symbol.
For Boston is the cradle of revolutionary iconography. Here the Liberty Tree was raised in 1765, the tea was thrown into the harbor in 1773, and Paul Revere engraved the 1770 massacre to inflame the colonies. This city turned an engraving into a weapon, a tree into an emblem, a December night into a national myth.
The city that taught America to brandish symbols gave itself the most silent of them all.
The flag flies, solemn and frozen, above a city that made its revolution with images, and entrusted its own to a seal no one looks at.