Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Having lost a major election, a waning, lame-duck president and his congressional allies packs the courts with new appointees, including a Supreme Court judge who will vote on whether the effort is constitutional. This frightening scenario is both amazingly current and, as today’s #stampoftheday illustrates, a piece […]

Sometimes I don’t know what to write about the current #stampoftheday; sometimes I know what to write about but not what to say. Today is one of those days. The topic is obvious because the 4-cent stamp, which was issued on September 22, 1958, celebrates “Freedom of the Press” – an ideal that is again

Tonight, the end of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and a day after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it seems appropriate that today’s #stampoftheday honors a Lajos Kossuth, a Hungarian who was one of the world’s best known freedom fighters in the mid 1800s. A Hungarian who was born on September 19, 1802,

The fragility of our constitutional form of government is the message I get from today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp, issued on September 17, 1937, it commemorates the 150th anniversary (or the sesquicentennial) of the Constitutional Convention’s vote to approve the proposed US Constitution on September 17, 1787. The proposed constitution, which the delegates had been

A medical expert employed by the U.S. government who more than a century ago used data and experiments to help address a major public health crisis is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday. A 5-cent stamp issued in 1940, it portrays Major Walter Reed, a physician and researcher who did groundbreaking work on both yellow fever

“Law and Order” is one of the most contentious – perhaps even one of the most noxious – political phrases of the last few decades. So I was stunned, when, while looking for something else in one of my late father’s stamp albums, I found it on a 6-cent stamp issued in May 1968. The

The diminished importance of the American labor movement, the declining economic fortunes of working-class white Americans, and the ominous rise of violent ethnic nationalism can all be found in today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp marking Labor Day issued on September 3, 1956. Like most of the stamps from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that I’ve

A massive celebration of liberation from more than four years of oppression is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp issued in 1945 that commemorates the liberation of Paris by Allied forces on August 25, 1944, it shows US troops parading in front of the Arc de Triomphe a few days after the Germans

Charles W. Eliot, a well-connected chemistry professor who failed to get tenure at Harvard but who went on to be the university’s longest serving president is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday. Here’s pictured on a 3-stamp stamps issued as part of the 1940 “Famous Americans” series. Eliot, who was as president of Harvard University from

I can’t tell you why there are Interstate Highways in Hawaii but I can tell you that, as today #stampoftheday shows, Hawaii became the nation’s 50th state on August 21, 1959. I can also tell you that the path Hawaii took to statehood was both tortured and, in many respects, embodies some of the worst