Readers are led step-by-step through the history and techniques of creating beautiful and rare Russian heirloom shawls with this detailed guide.

About The Poet Wing Commander Arun B. Srivastava. Born: Patna, India, November 17, 1944; Married Madhuri Srivastava, June 21, 1970; Education: St. Xavier's College, Ranchi, India, B.A. with honours, English; Monirba, Allahabad University, India, PG in Business Administration; Occupation: Officer, Indian Air Force (Retd.), Writer, Poet - works published in India and abroad, say Rashtriya Sahara, Contour, The Quest (an Indo-American literary quarterly), The Times, The Pioneer (India), and in American Poetry Anthology, Vol. X, No. 2, River Dreams and Sparkles in the Sand, both brought out by National Library of Poetry, Maryland (America) among others. Also compiled and edited an anthology of poetry, essays and reflections in a book, named IN HIS WORLD ALONE, published by Ms. Janki Prakashan, Patna/Delhi (ISBN 81-85078-71.8) His post retirement days are given over entirely to reading and writing. His works also include a collection of short stories.

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.