Collecting History

How stamps and stories collide

History buff here.

I think I it’s a trait passed down through my father, David Stevens, whose stamp collection was a portal into bygone times. (Check out Changing the Channel in a previous post, Ghost Writer, for how my dying father offered me a glimpse through his portal into another world before he passed.)

For David Stevens, “playing” with his stamps Credit: Family photo

Each postage stamp, each cancellation date, each place from-and-to, told a story. One of his favorite treasures was the upside down biplane, known officially as the Inverted Jenny. A 1918 misprint of a 24-cent stamp design of a blue airplane by the U.S. Post Office, it became the stuff of legend; the stamp’s limited printing of only 100 sheets before pulling the run turned it into a valuable collectors’ item. In 2023, just one of these rare stamps, still in pristine condition, sold for the jaw-dropping sum of $2,006,000.00.

My dad acquired a poor-man’s version—his “used” Inverted Jenny had a cancelation mark. As Daddy told the story, the anonymous correspondent who licked the “Jenny” on to an envelope was doubtless unaware of its value.

By the time he acquired it, that stamp had long been unglued from its original envelope, steamed off by some savvy philatelist who acquired it at a stamp show.

More valuable than “Jenny”, my father was curious to know the who, what, when, where, why and how. Researching the cancellation date and town or city was his entree into that story: was “Jenny” lovingly licked to affix to a letter to someone’s sweetheart? Did some homeowner use it to pay off his electric bill? Or was it a last goodbye from an American soldier to his parents before he shipped off to Europe to fight in World War I?

It was the human story that mattered to him. Its value lay in its story.

Daddy’s Jenny, then, though not pristine, was a treasure, so much so that my mother crafted it into a needlepoint. Daddy hung it proudly one the wall where he “played” with his stamps, and wove yarns documenting their history.

My own portal into history-as-story emerged in the process of penning the Edge of Yesterday, a YA time travel adventure book series. In it, my STEMinista protagonist, Charley Morton, invents Leonardo da Vinci’s plans for a time machine to win the middle school science fair.

But things almost immediately go haywire. When Leonardo’s machine accidentally activates, it sends her whirling back five centuries, across six time zones to land in an empty field at midnight under a hail of canon fire, and come face-to-face with the Renaissance genius himself.

And that’s only the start. Successfully hacking time, she goes on a quest to visit polymaths in history who might impart the secrets of their visionary genius so she can become a modern-day Renaissance girl, and invent a better future.

Connecting Past to Present

As an author, I do deep research, looking for clues about how people lived, what they might have worried about, how they spoke, and what challenges they might have faced in getting through the day-to-day. To keep things real, telling the story in the voice of a very twenty-first century time traveler requires me to keep things grounded in the life of young GenZ-ers by asking them those same questions. I consult regularly with a “Teen Story Advisors” club and, believe me, they do not hesitate to tell me ways to keep it lit.

Looking through this lens at the edge of yesterday has shown me how, through most of history, the everyday people living in almost any spacetime zone before our own would have stumbled through life unaware and powerless to change their life circumstances.

Could a serf in Medieval France intentionally improve his circumstance from penury to propertied? Could an enslaved field worker in Antebellum America decide to free his family—and make it stick? Before 1920, could a wife and mother vote—and have her vote legally counted?

No. Our ancestors’ lives were constrained by limits on their freedom, property and power by long-entrenched hierarchies that derived their power through heredity or battle or religious fiat.

Ordinary people, back in the day, would not even think of defying these authorities—and if they dared, they would have been subject to harsh consequences: torture, imprisonment, forced exile, or death.

America’s Inspired Idea

Our American experiment in freedom and equality is a model for the world.

My father is tapping me on the shoulder even as I write these words to remind me about how visiting the past can shine a light into new worlds—whether through stamp collecting, research, stories. He believed in the power of the American idea as a way to illuminate our present and transform lives into the future. “America may not be perfect, but it’s the best system the world has devised so far,” he would tell me.

To demonstrate, Daddy would use his tweezers (never let your own fingerprints knock down the value of a rare stamp!) and page through his stamp books to select those postal homages that were testament to our country’s defining moments: a 1940, ten-cent stamp to honor Booker T. Washington. A five-cent stamp issued to commemorate the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address, where he famously shared his vision of America’s shining light to a country at war: “Freedom of speech and religion, from want and fear.” Or the three-cent stamp, 85 years after the fact, memorializing Lincoln’s Gettysburg address engraved with his words, “That government by the people, of the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

And most proudly, on the occasion of the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, he displayed a pristine, four-set panorama of 13-cent stamps honoring that enduring flash of insight that the framers of the Declaration of Independence stamped on our nation and gave to the world: that all people are created equal, with certain inalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Placing that last carefully into a cellophane envelope, he articulated his conviction that these principles represented a radical new idea: that “We the People" have the power—as individuals, as communities, and as nations—to engage in the process and choose for ourselves how we want to live.

That message became indelibly stamped in my brain. As Americans, we have been granted a gift: to assess our lives and circumstances and, to choose, and to engage in how we want to see our freedom. In making our choices, we find a portal to enter into a better tomorrow. That is our right and responsibility.

I have come to see how the past sets the stage for the larger work of how we might both integrate and heal injustices of the past in order to intentionally shape our present in ways that propel us forward.

It is our responsibility to decide for ourselves, our families, our communities, and generations yet to come how we want to shape that.

To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, our choices today will determine who we become tomorrow. Not ours alone, but as a collective.

It’s worth reflecting on.

• Who are we?

• Who do we wish to become?

• And what step might you take now to set yourself on that path?

Choose wisely.