The 1840 Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system, is today's #stampoftheday. The stamp, which features a profile of Queen Victoria, was issued …
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
"Register - Vote" is the uncannily timely message from today's #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp issued on August 1, 1964. I have mixed reactions to this stamp. Obviously, I agree with its basic …
Believe it or not, chicken is the focus of today's #stampoftheday, which is a posting I've been looking forward to since I first saw this stamp in my late father's …
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 …
Ulysses S. Grant, who died on July 23, 1885 days after he finished writing his widely acclaimed autobiography, today makes an encore appearance in today's #stampoftheday, which is an 18-cent …
While today's #stampoftheday pictures two extraordinarily (almost scarily) wholesome youth, the story behind the stamp leads me to some of my favorite lyrics from West Side Story (with a brief …