It is fitting that the American Chemical Society (ACS) comes to the fore as my #stampoftheday "project" (obsession?) is coming to a close. For chemistry, in general, and the ACS, …
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'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 …
The #stampoftheday for Sunday, April 26, is the 10-cent 1940 stamp honoring Jane Addams was a social reformer who was the co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She …
Stifled in his job in Boston (and probably chafing at the city's restrictive culture), a young man moves to New York, where he thinks he can find a job (and …
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 …
For obvious reasons, the 5-cent stamp honoring "Amateur Radio" that is today's #stampoftheday made me think of the "Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map," an amazing website curated by David Goren, …