February 24 marked the death of the oldest living Holocaust survivor. Certainly there are still survivors out there, but they are growing scarcer by the year. Someone who was 15 in 1945 would be 83 today, and most people under the age of 15 didn’t survive the Holocaust at allContinue Reading
Yesterday I introduced the billion mark stamp from 1923 Germany with a bit of background behind this truly absurd item. Today, I visited a stamp store (which the owner says now officially makes me a philatelist, rather than a person who just happens to have stamps) and had a lovelyContinue Reading
The poor state of history education in our primary and secondary schools has left many of my college students seeing history as nothing but distinct facts to be memorized, often in list form. I know I had to repeatedly memorize the major battles of the Revolutionary War and their dates.Continue Reading
As previously mentioned, my grandfather’s concept of organization is…creative. Going through his jumbled collection of stamps invoked many facepalming exclamations of “Grandpa!” This was one of them, exclaimed even before I opened the envelope to which he had scotch-taped a green stamp of Benjamin Franklin. Scotch-taped. By its appearance itContinue Reading
Almost 50 years after his death, Alan Turing is finally pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II. Turing was a pioneer in cryptography (most notably in connection with breaking the WWII Enigma codes) and early computing. He wrote on the possibilities of artificial intelligence, which he expected we would develop within fiftyContinue Reading
This should have been a “Today in History” post, but I am a day late. On December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor. The resolution passed unanimously in the Senate, but a single representative refused to approve it. Rep.Continue Reading
Studying history comes with both bad and good. It’s important we remember both, both as something to celebrate and something we try not to repeat. Modern history is not my thing, but of that era, the Holocaust is one of my interests, although it’s so awful I sometimes literally haveContinue Reading