On September 1, 1939, 1.5 million German soldiers and more than 2,500 tanks invaded Poland, while more than 2,000 German airplanes began bombing Polish cities, air bases, fortifications, bridges, and …
Be well. Stay safe. Fight for justice.
Work for peace.
In April of 2020, not long after the COVID-19 pandemic began, I had an inexplicable urge to dig into my late father’s stamp collection, which had been sitting unexamined on my shelves since about 2012. I created a challenge for myself: each day find a stamp that was somehow connected to that day, write a short blurb about it, and post it on Facebook with a picture of the stamp. I thought I’d do that for a few weeks. But the pandemic continued and what started as short blurbs became a year of daily essays that not only discussed historic events, famous people, and obscure Americana but also recounted personal and family stories and examined how these decades-old stamps shed light on a host contemporary challenges. Thanks to my daughter Rebecca, every one of those 365 essays – from the early succinct ones to the later rambling ones – are collected on this website, where you can view them by date, by broad category, or by whether they were my “personal favorites.” I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Historical Figures & Events
Delving into the people and events that shaped history
Culture & Society
Exploring Americana artifacts and other obscure areas of US history
Contemporary Issues
Discussing the pandemic, 2020 politics, and other recent happenings
Personal & Family Lore
Recounting stories from my childhood, “adulthood,” and family’s history
Featured Essays
Author favorites
Like many people, I cried more than once today. I cried so much, that I can't remember everything that caused me to tear up. I cried when I watched the videos of …
Maybe it's something in the water or perhaps it's the famous fog but San Francisco, apparently, has a thing for name changes. One hundred and seventy four years ago today, the …
"Search for peace," a good message at any time, seems particularly important in this troubled summer. So it's nice that today's #stampoftheday is a 5-cent "Search for Peace" stamp issued …
We never spoke about it, but I suspect that my father had a particular soft spot for Joseph Priestly. As someone trained as a chemist, my father would have known of …
Like many of my generation, I learned that Robert E. Lee was special. Yes, we were taught that Lee fought for the Confederacy, which wanted to preserve slavery. But that …