Paper Trails

The US Post and the Making of the American West

By: Cameron Blevins

Narrated by: Steve Menasche

Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late 19th-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. 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.

©2021 Oxford University Press (P)2021 Tantor

A remarkable book, not just for history buffs

I picked up this book because I’m interested in the cultural history of Western expansion, expecting a good but dry academic tome. The book is anything but dry and it brings history of the period through the stories of the real people who used mail as a way to connect with their families, send money for goods and services, or as a business. The book is also important because it dispels a number of myths on how the US government operates, and proposes to do a similar mapping of the systems that underlie our reality (social media platforms, search companies) the same way USPS did in the XIX and XX century US.

Important story of the Post Office's roots

I loved this book. It's insights into how the Post Office's quick, unstable expansion shaped the way the West was settled. And also how rural free delivery was the key to establishing the top-down central control that we know today came about. The book is bigger than the Post Office. It is the story of government and the story of the United States.