Last fall, after Judge Am Amy Coney Barrett promised to "apply the law as it is written" and leave policy decisions to the other branches of government, Stephen Budiansky wrote a letter that was published in the New York Times. "If that's all judges need to do, we'd have no need for judges." Budiansky, author of …
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Believe it or not, an overweight general known as "Old Fuss and Feathers" who was pushed aside at the start of the Civil War and who also was in the word's of one reviewer, "a lousy writer," whose "memoir disappoints in a number of ways," is the focus of today's #stampoftheday. Winfield Scott, who was a …
"Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," may be the one of the most famous lines in American history. These are the words, of course, that Alexander Graham Bell supposedly said on the first time he successfully used his newly invented telephone on March 10, 1876. Thinking about the call and Bell - who is …
The first stamp to picture Native Americans was issued in 1893, almost 69 years after then Secretary of War John Calhoun created the Bureau of Indian Affairs on March 11, 1824. Initially part of the War Department, BIA has been part of the Interior Department since 1849. So there's a kind of notable irony in …
For me, and many other people, today is the one-year anniversary of when I not only started working from home but also began to actively avoid as many face-to-face interactions as possible. Reflecting on this anniversary this evening, I've been thinking about what I've needed to get through the year. That, in turn, made me …
How would you feel, if a web page on your "impact and legacy" read something like this: "Coffee-table history books depict [your name here] as a lightweight puppet of political party bosses. S/he is often viewed as little more than a 'human iceberg' who sleepwalked through [insert your job here]. We are told that while …
If the #stampoftheday posts were like the Miller Analogies Test, I might have started today's post by asking "George Washington Carver is to peanuts as Horace Mann is to what?" The answer would have been something like "education" though "schools" also would have been acceptable. That's because Horace Mann, who is pictured on today's #stampoftheday, was—and still …
Six years ago today, I got on an airplane in Boston to head to Los Angeles. Later that day, the National Weather Service officially reported that the winter 2014-2015 was the snowiest year since we started keeping track of such things. We had, at that point received 108.6 inches, breaking a record set in 1994-1995 …
"If only my uncle, the general, was here." Those were the magic words that allowed my parents to get married in Baltimore on August 1, 1944. And they were the words my mother loved to repeat when she told the story, which she did so frequently that her grandkids could (and would) mouth the words as …