Stamp of the Century recounts the stories of passionate collectors and dealers, society women, captains of industry, and even thieves and murderers who bought, sold, stole, fenced, and mutilated the Inverted Jenny.

The most comprehensive introduction and guide to collecting U.S. stamps ever written. It opens the hobby to a new generation of collectors, and serves as a treasured reference for established ones. This book, which supplements and transcends a catalog, provides the reader with a vast array of information about United States stamps, as well as many practical tips and suggestions for collecting them. There s over 300 years of American history carefully written and designed to appeal to collectors of all ages, and levels of interest. Kirk House Publishers is pleased to present this unique resource as a salute to these fascinating and highly collectible tiny pieces of paper and to the men and women who collect them.

Every stamp and piece of mail tells a story. In fact, each often tells multiple stories, ranging from concept to art design to production to usage, often with tales of politics, history, technology, biography, genealogy, economics, geography, disaster, and triumph. The lens of philately offers a fresh and engaging story of American history, culture, and identity, and it can also help deepen the understanding of world cultures. The William H. Gross Stamp Gallery, opened at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in September 2013, has many such stories to tell. Chief philately curator Cheryl R. Ganz guides readers through some of the gallery's nearly 20,000 objects that together illustrate the history of our nation's postal operations and postage stamps.

When Parliament sought to raise funds through the passing of the Stamp Act in 1765, they did not anticipate the protests and staunch opposition to the new law that would ensue in the colonies. Though the crisis was eventually resolved, the larger questions raised by Parliament’s action and colonial resistance remained unanswered. What started as a debate over taxation would end in a struggle for independence. The Stamp Act Crisis, 1765–1766, marks the transition in United States history from the Colonial Era to the Era of the American Revolution. The full narrative of the Stamp Act includes political, social, economic, and cultural histories on both sides of the Atlantic. This volume provides the reader with the opportunity to engage with the pamphlets, letters, speeches, legal documents, and other texts and images that people in the colonies and in London were themselves reading, debating, and reacting to at the time. The introduction incorporates recent scholarship and provides a fresh look at this key moment in American history, and the informative headnotes and rich annotations help orient the reader within the historical sources.

The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities. In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.