The "ruptured duck" on May 9th's #stampoftheday spurs a narrative that goes from honoring soldiers, to a mid-20th century film star, to Bluetooth and finally to Mel Brooks. Here goes...the stamp is a 3-cent stamp issued in 1946 "Honoring All Those Who Served" in World War II. It pictures the Honorable Discharge Emblem, surrounded by five …
Topic: Culture & Society
Exploring Americana artifacts and other obscure areas of US history
Today's #stampoftheday took me into a whole different part of my dad's stamp collection: a notebook full not of stamps but of postage-meter stamps, mostly from the mid 1950s, organized by state and then city. Some states, like New York, are well represented. Pages for others, like Wyoming, are blank. Here's a cancellation for May 12, …
Two offerings for the May 13th #stampoftheday. The first is a 5-cent stamp picturing Edward McDowell that is part of the 1940 "famous Americans" series discussed in earlier posts. McDowell, who lived from 1860 to 1908, was a well-known composer, pianist, and teacher who also was Columbia University's first professor of music and one of …
The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) "Women in Armed Forces," which was founded on May 15, 1942, is the focus of today's #stampoftheday: a 3-cent stamp issued in 1952 honoring "Women in Our Armed Services.". Before World War II, women were generally only allowed on the battlefield as nurses or as volunteers as communications specialists or …
The #stampoftheday for May 21 is a 3-cent stamp issued on May 21, 1955 honoring America's Armed Forces reserve units. The reserves were first established in 1908 as a way to ensure that there would be medical officers available in times of war or other national emergencies. In the National Defense Act of 1920, Congress …
Infrastructure is the theme for two stamps I offer #stampoftheday for Sunday, May 24, 2020. The first is a 3-cent stamp issued in 1944 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the day that Samuel F.B. Morse, who invented the telegraph, sat in the Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol and tapped out the message to …
I was struggling to find a #stampoftheday for today, wondering if I might finally have hit a dead end when I stumbled on an appropriate stamp not in my father's US albums but instead in the two albums of UN stamps, which included an airmail stamp and air mail postcard both released on May 27, …
The #stampoftheday for May 28 is a 1-cent Ulysses S. Grant postal card postmarked May 28 1892. (Yes, in addition to U.S., U.N., and Israeli stamps and first-day covers, as well as postage meter cancellations, my father also had postcards, some old, some from the mid-19th century, in his collection. In fact I've been using …
The tallest stamp the Post Office had ever issued when it was released on May 27, 1926 is today's #stampoftheday. The stamp features John Ericsson, the self-taught Swedish-born inventor who not only designed the Monitor, the iron-clad Union ship that played a decisive role in the Civil War, but also made seminal improvements in the design …