The Confederate states went through three official flags during the four-year Civil War, but none of them was the battle flag that’s at the center of the current controversy. The first was the ...

“When the Confederacy broke away, one of the first things that the Confederate Congress did was pick a flag,” Leepson says. “There was a big debate, and the debate centered on how close the ...

Civil War historians told PolitiFact the flag does not represent a Confederate flag. The first Confederate flag had a varying number of stars based on how many states seceded from the Union.

But the Confederate battle flag was flown by rioters in the U.S. Capitol building for the first time ever on Jan. 6. The flag’s prominence in the Capitol riot comes as no surprise to those who ...