A multi-year effort to find a vaccine and treatment for a much-feared disease is the subject of today’s #stampoftheday, which was issued on June 15, 1957. The disease was polio, a …
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 April 18, 2020, I wrote a short, paragraph-long Facebook post that started: "though I've had them for years, it's only in the last year that I started to look …
In 1975, like many in the cast, I grew a beard for our high school's production of "Fiddler on the Roof." (I played the rabbi.) Except a few brief interludes …
With the calendar turning to July, it seems appropriate that today's #stampoftheday honors school teachers (and other educators), who hopefully are getting a well-deserved break after an especially tumultuous spring …
To a man with a post office, every problem looks like a stamp. At least that seems to be the thinking behind today’s #stampoftheday, a 4-cent stamp issued in 1961l. Unlike …
What do I "want" to say about New Jersey? And what "should" I say about the "Garden State." I ask, in part, because on December 18, 1787 New Jersey became the …