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Paper trails : the US post and the making of the American West / Cameron Blevins.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]Description: x, 232 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780190053673
  • 0190053674
Subject(s):
Contents:
The Gossamer Network -- Geography and State Power -- Stories and Structures -- Postal Maps, 1860-1883 -- Mail Routes and the Costs of Expansion, 1866-1883 -- The Post Office Window, 1880-1892 -- Money Orders and National Integration, 1864-1895 -- Rural Free Delivery, 1896-1913 -- The Modern American State.
Summary: "Gossamer Network presents a new history of the American state and its efforts to conquer, occupy, and integrate the western United States between the 1860s and early 1900s. The success of this project depended on an unassuming government institution: the U.S. Post. As millions of settlers rushed into remote corners of the region, they relied on the mail to stay connected to the wider world. Letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders, all travelled across the most expansive communications network on earth. Gossamer Network maps the year-by-year spread of this infrastructure using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new and unfamiliar picture of the federal government in the West. Despite its size, the U.S. Post was both nimble and ephemeral, rapidly spinning out its infrastructure to distant places before melting away at a moment's notice. The administration of this network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions today. Instead, the U.S. Post grafted public mail service onto the private operations of thousands of local businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry bags of mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. The postal network's sprawling geography and localized operations forces a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power. This book tells the story of one of the most dramatic reorganizations of people, land, and resources in American history and the underlying spatial circuitry that wove this project together"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 383.4978 B647 Available 33111010504526
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A groundbreaking history of how the US Post made the nineteenth-century American West.There were five times as many post offices in the United States in 1899 than there are McDonald's restaurants today. During an era of supposedly limited federal government, the United States operated the most expansive national postal system in the world. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late nineteenth-century United States, Cameron Blevins argues that the US Post wove together two of the era's defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, the western United States underwent a truly dramatic reorganization of people, land, capital, and resources. It had taken Anglo-Americans the better part of two hundred years to occupy the eastern half of the continent, yet they occupied the West within a single generation. As millions of settlers moved into the region, they relied on letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders to stay connected to the wider world. Paper Trails maps the spread of the US Post using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new picture of the federal government in the West. The western postal network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions. Instead, the US Post grafted public mail service onto private businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry the mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. These arrangements allowed the US Post to rapidly spin out a vast and ephemeral web of postal infrastructure to thousands of distant places.The postal network's sprawling geography and localized operations forces a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Gossamer Network presents a new history of the American state and its efforts to conquer, occupy, and integrate the western United States between the 1860s and early 1900s. The success of this project depended on an unassuming government institution: the U.S. Post. As millions of settlers rushed into remote corners of the region, they relied on the mail to stay connected to the wider world. Letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders, all travelled across the most expansive communications network on earth. Gossamer Network maps the year-by-year spread of this infrastructure using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new and unfamiliar picture of the federal government in the West. Despite its size, the U.S. Post was both nimble and ephemeral, rapidly spinning out its infrastructure to distant places before melting away at a moment's notice. The administration of this network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions today. Instead, the U.S. Post grafted public mail service onto the private operations of thousands of local businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry bags of mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. The postal network's sprawling geography and localized operations forces a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power. This book tells the story of one of the most dramatic reorganizations of people, land, and resources in American history and the underlying spatial circuitry that wove this project together"-- Provided by publisher.

The Gossamer Network -- Geography and State Power -- Stories and Structures -- Postal Maps, 1860-1883 -- Mail Routes and the Costs of Expansion, 1866-1883 -- The Post Office Window, 1880-1892 -- Money Orders and National Integration, 1864-1895 -- Rural Free Delivery, 1896-1913 -- The Modern American State.

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