"Rarely do scholars of postal organizations and systems meet and discuss their ideas and research with scholars of philately. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the National Postal Museum and the American Philatelic Society hosted the first Winton M. Blount Postal History symposium on 3-4 November 2006 to bring together these two research groups to discuss postal history. This publication covers the next two symposia. The 2010 theme was "Stamps and the Mail: Images, Icons and Identity." Stamps, as official government documents, can be treated as primary resources designed to convey specific political and esthetic messages. Other topics and themes for the symposium were stamp design's influence on advertising envelopes and bulk mailings, censorship of stamps as propaganda as used on letters, and the role of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee or organizations that generate the designs. The 2011 symposium was held at the American Philatelic Center in conjunction with the United States Stamp Society's annual meeting. The United States Stamp Society is the preeminent organization devoted to the study of U.S. stamps. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run association of collectors to promote the study of the philatelic output of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and of postage and revenue stamped paper produced by others for use in the United States and U.S. administered areas."--Publisher's website.

Rarely do scholars of postal organizations and systems meet and discuss their ideas and research with scholars of philately. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the National Postal Museum and the American Philatelic Society hosted the first Winton M. Blount Postal History symposium on 3-4 November 2006 to bring together these two research groups to discuss postal history. This publication covers the next two symposia. The 2010 theme was "Stamps and the Mail: Images, Icons and Identity." Stamps, as official government documents, can be treated as primary resources designed to convey specific political and esthetic messages. Other topics and themes for the symposium were stamp design's influence on advertising envelopes and bulk mailings, censorship of stamps as propaganda as used on letters, and the role of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee or organizations that generate the designs. The 2011 symposium was held at the American Philatelic Center in conjunction with the United States Stamp Society's annual meeting. The United States Stamp Society is the preeminent organization devoted to the study of U.S. stamps. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run association of collectors to promote the study of the philatelic output of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and of postage and revenue stamped paper produced by others for use in the United States and U.S. administered areas. The theme of the symposium was "How Commerce and Industry Shaped the Mails."

More than three thousand different images appeared on United States postage stamps from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. Limited at first to the depiction of a small cast of characters and patriotic images, postal iconography gradually expanded as the Postal Service sought to depict the country’s history in all its diversity. This vast breadth has helped make stamp collecting a widespread hobby and made stamps into consumer goods in their own right. Examining the canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American stamps, Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler show how postal iconography and material culture offer a window into the contested meanings and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. They argue that postage stamps, which are both devices to pay for a government service and purchasable items themselves, embody a crucial tension: is democracy defined by political agency or the freedom to buy? The changing images and uses of stamps reveal how governmental authorities have attempted to navigate between public service and businesslike efficiency, belonging and exclusion, citizenship and consumerism. Stamps are vehicles for state messaging, and what they depict is tied up with broader questions of what it means to be American. Goldblatt and Handler combine historical, sociological, and iconographic analysis of a vast quantity of stamps with anthropological exploration of how postal customers and stamp collectors behave. At the crossroads of several disciplines, this book casts the symbolic and material meanings of stamps in a wholly new light.

This book explores how states in political transition use stamps to promote a new visual nationalism. Stamps as products of the state and provide small pieces of information about a state’s heritage, culture, economies and place in the world. These depictions change over time, reflecting political and cultural changes and developments. The volume explores the transition times in more than a dozen countries from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. Specifically addressed are the stamp topics, issues and themes in the years before and after such major changes occurred, for example, from a European colony to political independence or from a dictatorship to democracy. The authors compare the personalities, histories, and cultural representations "before" the transition period and how the state used the "after" event to define or redefine its place on the world political map. The final three chapters consider international themes on many stamp issues, one being stamps with Disney cartoon characters, another on "themeless" Forever stamps, and the third on states celebrating women and their accomplishments. This volume has wide interdisciplinary relevance and should prove of particular interest to those studying geopolitics, political transition, visual nationalism, soft power and visual representations of decolonializing.

This book explores stage conjuring during its “golden age,” from about 1860 to 1910. This study provides close readings highlighting four paradigmatic illusions of the time that stand in for different kinds of illusions typical of stage magic in the “golden age” and analyses them within their cultural and media-historical context: “Pepper’s Ghost,” the archetypical mirror illusion; “The Vanishing Lady,” staging a teleportation in a time of a dizzying acceleration of transport; “the levitation,” simulating weightlessness with the help of an extended steel machinery; and “The Second Sight,” a mind-reading illusion using up-to-date communication technologies. These close readings are completed by writings focusing on visual media and expanding the scope backwards and forwards in time, roughly to 1800 and to 2000. This exploration will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.

An exciting new reference work that illuminates the beliefs, customs, events, material culture, and institutions that made up Emily Dickinson's world, giving users a glance at both Dickinson's life and times and the social history of America in the 19th century. While Emily Dickinson is one of the most widely studied American poets, some dimensions of her life and work are largely under-appreciated. This book provides the wider context necessary for a more complete understanding of Dickinson, presenting Dickinson's life and times as well as discussion of her poetry and letters. Prolific author and Dickinson expert Wendy Martin and 59 contributors address the relationship between Emily Dickinson's life and work and the larger world in which she lived. Examination of topics such as the history of Amherst, MA, and the Dickinson family's place in it; and the cultural, financial, political, legal, and religious practices of the day illuminate important dimensions of Dickinson's experiences and world for students, scholars, and general readers of this iconic poet's work.

“’The history of its Post Office is nothing less than the story of America,’ Ms. Gallagher’s opening sentence declares, and in this lively book she makes the case well.”—Wall Street Journal A masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development. The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. government’s largest and most important endeavor—indeed, it was the government for most citizens. This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen—a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers. America’s uniquely democratic post powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the world’s information and communications superpower with astonishing speed. Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America’s own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail—then “the media”—imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices. The post was the catalyst of the nation’s transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, the consumer culture, and the political party system. Still one of the country’s two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, African Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life. Starved by two world wars and the Great Depression, confronted with the country’s increasingly anti-institutional mind-set, and struggling with its doubled mail volume, the post stumbled badly in the turbulent 1960s. Distracted by the ensuing modernization of its traditional services, however, it failed to transition from paper mail to email, which prescient observers saw as its logical next step. Now the post office is at a crossroads. Before deciding its future, Americans should understand what this grand yet overlooked institution has accomplished since 1775 and consider what it should and could contribute in the twenty-first century. Gallagher argues that now, more than ever before, the imperiled post office deserves this effort, because just as the founders anticipated, it created forward-looking, communication-oriented, idea-driven America.