Presidential Seal

I continued to follow the American Presidents Blog this week and found new piece of random history. Last Friday, the blog had a post concerning the history of the Presidential Seal. Apparently, the first seal was created by Fillmore in 1850. After that, presidents changed it as they pleased. In 1945, Truman created the modern Presidential Seal, which has an eagle holding an olive branch with thirteen leafs in one talon and thirteen arrows in the other. It is surrounding by fifty stars. The obvious American symbolism is there, but the interesting part is the changes he made. He changed the direction the eagle faces from the arrows to the olive branch. Once again, the symbolism is obvious, especially considering the time in which he made this change. The blog post also notes that this change occurred around the same time the the Department of Defense became the new Department of War. While these changes are all nice and feel good, they do beg the question of there use. This is especially interesting to me considering our governments new found propinquity to call our armed forces the uniformed services instead.