About a year and a half ago, when I first started going through my late father's stamp collection, I was delighted to find a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1957, honoring …
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
Officially, I voted for the first time, in 1976. Unofficially, I had been voting for years. My mother used to bring me with her when she voted in the gymnasium at …
The radical idea that the federal government can and does use science and facts to address potentially fatal threats to people's health is the message sent by today's #stampoftheday, which …
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 …
Today's #stampoftheday manages to simultaneously diminish both a notable woman and the state of New Jersey. Issued in 1928, the stamp was issued to mark the 150th anniversary of the Battle …
Sometime in the mid-1960s, my mother and I drove over the then-new Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened on November 21, 1964. As we crossed over "the Narrows," which separate Brooklyn from Staten …