"A History of Ranching," Buck Winn's largest painting, is a 280-foot-long mural commissioned in 1950 that hung for decades in the "Corral Room," at Pearl Beer's brewery in San Antonio. …
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
Acadia National Park, a place I've loved over the years, takes center stage as today's #stampoftheday because on July 8, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson created Sieur de Monts National Monument, …
In 1949, my father received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Cooper Union. Seventy years later, we found his lab reports and tests in the boxes of papers, photos, …
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 …
I haven't seen the eyes of Isabella Gibbons, which look out from the exterior wall of the new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. But reviewers say …
"In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost," is one of many lines that Dante Alighieri …