Description
Book SynopsisExamining 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.
Trade ReviewIn this thrilling account of United States postage stamps, Goldblatt and Handler show us that enduring national myths are inextricably bound up with racial segregation, settler colonialism, and consumerism. Beautifully written and compellingly argued, this book shows that the United States postage stamp is as complex, fraught, and contradictory as the nation itself. -- Elizabeth Chin, author of
My Life with Things: The Consumer DiariesThe American Stamp describes in layered detail how postage stamps perform the “ideological magic” of making one people out of all these raced, classed, and gendered addresses and pieces of paper. It is materialist analysis at its most unforgettable. -- Laura Wexler, author of
Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. ImperialismGoldblatt and Handler offer an original and well documented interpretation of U.S. postage stamps that will be of interest to a wide array of audiences: stamp collectors and postal historians, to be sure, but also anyone interested in the construction and transformation of U.S. citizenship, consumerism, and popular representation. This book makes a fascinating and important contribution to the literature on nationalism, citizenship, and collecting. -- Pauline Turner Strong, author of
American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the CenturiesGiven email, supply chain setbacks, and fears of mail-in ballot corruption, many would consider a stamp the relic of a dying era. But Goldblatt and Handler powerfully bring the stamp back to life as an unrecognized measure of American democracy’s future and not just its past. In
The American Stamp we find a timely and historically rigorous examination of the consumer republic and its limits. -- Davarian Baldwin, author of
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our CitiesTable of ContentsIntroduction
Part I: Mailing, Collecting, Cataloguing1. The Postal Infrastructure of Democratic Citizenship
2. Creating Post-postal Value: Stamp Collecting
3. U.S. Stamps: Cataloguing Polities and Framing National Culture
Part II: Storied Ancestors4. Fixing the Iconography of National Ancestry: Dead Heads and Moving Bodies During the U.S. Civil War
5. Mining History and Marketing Stamps at the World’s Fairs
6. The People in the Postal Polity: Twentieth-Century Definitive Stamps and the Iconography of Democratic Inclusion
Part III: The Stamp of Neoliberalism7. Postal People: From Industrial Labor, Black Power, and Social Service to Cartoon Citizenship
8. Segregating Stamps: From White Definitives to Racialized Commemoratives
9. How to Do Things with Stamps, Part I: First-Day Covers
10. How to Do Things with Stamps, Part II: Shooting the Moon
Conclusion: Postal Circulation and Citizenship at the End of the American Century
Acknowledgments
Appendix: How Many People Collect Stamps in the United States?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
