We’ve all been there. Asked to say meaningful and appropriate remarks at some important occasion, we blow it. Maybe we went on too long. Maybe we said something we shouldn’t have. Maybe we were expressing some unresolved anger. Or maybe we were deliberately expressing our hostility. If it’s any solace, Mark Twain has been there […]

“What does labor want,” asked Samuel Gomers, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday. “We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate

Sometimes a thin stamp contains layers of meaning. Today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on December 9. 1948 that pictures Joel Chandler Harris, is one of those stamps. Before I started writing this post, I didn’t know who Harris was. But it turns out I am indirectly familiar with his work because Harris, who was

Like most people of my generation, I learned that Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin (and who is featured on today’s #stampoftheday, was one of America’s “Great Men.” What I didn’t understand or know then is that Whitney’s legacy is, to say the least, mixed. Whitney, who was born on December 8, 1765, was

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” This striking observation comes from “Oh Pioneers,” a 1913 novel

WWJFDD? That is, what would John Foster Dulles do? That question occurred to me as I thought about today’s #stampoftheday (number 232 if you’re counting) – a 4-cent stamp picturing Dulles that was issued on December 6, 1960. In many ways, Dulles now is a largely forgotten figure. But in the mid-20th century, he was

In December 1941, a few days after the United States declared war, Winston Churchill secretly boarded a British battleship, which made a dangerous 10-day journey to the United States. The journey was so secret that Eleanor Roosevelt later wrote that while President Franklin Roosevelt told her “that we would be having some guests visit us,”