I ended yesterday's #stampoftheday post by asking "What were they thinking?" when they issued a stamp celebrating the forced relocation of Native Americans. Today, however, it's clear "what they were thinking" …
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
Over the past year, I've added stamps portraying Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Karl Marx to the many, many knickknacks on three small shelves in my basement office. The stamps …
I live close to Concord, Massachusetts which means that whenever I'm feeling too adequate, I can recalibrate by taking a modest bike ride past the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, …
Political leadership, for good and for ill, is one of the messages I receive from today's #stampoftheday, a 10-cent stamp picturing Daniel Webster, who in the first half of the …
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, …
You would think that after writing 337 #stampoftheday posts, that a stamp could no longer surprise me. While you'd usually be right. Today you are wrong. The stamp that surprised me …