Stamp of the Day

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

  On September 1, 1939, 1.5 million German soldiers and more than 2,500 tanks invaded Poland, while more than 2,000 German airplanes began bombing Polish cities, air bases, fortifications, bridges, and …

I grew up singing many of Stephen Foster's well-known songs, particularly "Oh Susanna," "Camptown Races," and "Old Folks at Home" (aka "Swanee River"). But I don't remember ever thinking about …

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 …

In the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016, when I regularly showered Harvard's Hemenway Gymnasium after biking to work, I thought surprisingly often about Senator Ted Cruz, who graduated …

As I write this #stampoftheday, I'm sitting on a screened-in porch watching it rain on a lake in Maine and I'm remembering a long-ago trip that I believe was my …

  Two timely policy questions—"make or buy?" and "can public-sector employees innovate?" - are conveyed by the two seemingly prosaic stamps that make up today's #stampoftheday offerings. The stamps are a 6-cent …