I haven't thought about Jean Shepherd for a long time. But there was a time - I think it was when I was in junior high school - when, like …
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
"If only my uncle, the general, was here." Those were the magic words that allowed my parents to get married in Baltimore on August 1, 1944. And they were the words …
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 …
John Glenn, the first American (and third person) to orbit the earth, wasn't my favorite astronaut in the mid 1960s. That honor belonged to the lesser known Wally Schirra, who …
While today's #stampoftheday honors a decision made in 1898, it also connects directly the inflammatory tweets about fair housing made by Donald Trump earlier this week. The stamp itself, is a …
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 …