"And now for something completely different" - a postage stamp encased in metal, complete with advertising on one side. This is not a commercial oddity. Rather, during the Civil War, …
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
Today, when violent right-wing fascists have attacked the US Capital, I find it heartening to see that on January 6, 1941, at a time when the Nazis and other fascists …
"Have you gotten to the part where Beth dies?" my wife innocently asked her younger sister, who, many years ago, was eagerly reading "Little Women." Her sister, of course, hadn't …
Though I've had them for years, it's only in the last year that I started to look at my late father's stamp collection which goes from the late 1800s until …
In 1962, when the U.S. Post Office Department released a jingle to go with its first ever Christmas stamp. Set to the tune of Jingle Bells, it went: "Christmas stamps, Christmas …
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 …