A message about the slow but inexorable ways that change occurs is offered by today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp. Issued on June 21, 1955, the stamp shows New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain rock formation, which collapsed in 2003d despite decades of efforts to prevent that decline. The 40-foot-tall “face” in New Hampshire’s White […]

For at least two reasons, it seems appropriate that my father’s collection lacks the stamp I want to highlight as the #stampoftheday on Juneteenth, which marks the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the Confederacy was announced in Galveston, Texas, the last holdout of the rebel forces. With that announcement, slavery

One of America’s greatest and most paradoxical presidents and leaders is featured on today’s #stampoftheday, which is a 3-cent stamp showing Thomas Jefferson that was issued on June 16, 1938. Jefferson, of course, was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from

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 virus that paralyzes muscles and destroys nerve cells that was common in the US during the first half of the 20th century. The first

An obscure, slaveholding plantation owner who played a major role in making the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution and in the electoral system that produced a president who has been working to undermine those rights gets the spotlight for today’s #stampoftheday. Issued on June 13, 1958, the 3-cent stamp features Gunston Hall, the

A 5-cent stamp picturing Ulysses S. Grant that was issued on June 11, 1895 “should” be today’s #stampoftheday. But since Grant was the subject of the May 28 #stampoftheday I’m going to reach back a few days to the wonderfully illustrative, 4-cent “American Women” stamp that I overlooked on June 2nd, which was the 60th

Today #stampoftheday journeys to sea with the 3-cent stamp issued on June 10, 1957 to commemorate the 1957 International Naval Review, on June 12. The review was based in Hampton Roads was scheduled to coincide with the 350th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent white settlement in the U.S. It featured about

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 19th century was one of the nation’s leading politicians and one of its best lawyers as well. Webster, who was known as one his era’s

A seemingly banal, classic mid-20th century image of a white mail carrier that is today’s #stampoftheday turned out deliver a timely lesson about the ways that the government, particularly the federal government, can be used to both further oppression and foster opportunity. The stamp is a 15-cent stamp special delivery stamp issued on June 6,

The odd ways that old stamps can illuminate current issues is again the theme for today’s #stampoftheday, the 5-cent Swedish Pioneer Centennial stamp, which was issued on June 4, 1948. The stamp , which commemorates the 100th anniversary of Swedish pioneers traveling to the Midwest, pictures a Swedish pioneer’s covered wagon traveling westward. On either