"The postage stamp of the United States is a window into the ideology of American citizenship. Stamps differ from other repositories of nationalist messaging such as monuments, museums and textbooks. They are centrally controlled (by the post office), yet they change rapidly-more than three thousand different stamps have been deployed since the middle of the nineteenth century. The ubiquity of stamps in national life-and the fact that they change regularly yet remain controlled by a remarkably stable national agency-have made them a site where some of the deepest principles of U.S. national citizenship have been fixed, developed, deployed and challenged. The American Stamp is a study of the iconography and material history explores how the postage stamp has been a staging ground for a long-term debate concerning two views of U.S. citizenship, one centered on the freedoms afforded by democracy and the other on the freedoms afforded by consumerism. Stamps for most of the nineteenth century stuck to a political register, featuring a small cast of great men of politics and warfare. A decisive change occurred in connection with the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, on which occasion the post office created the first U.S. "commemorative" stamps. These stamps celebrated the moment-the fair and the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus' voyage-but were not intended to stay in circulation or displace "regular issue" stamps. The creation of commemorative stamps opened the door to consumer choice as a driver of postal iconography. Interest groups soon learned to lobby the post office, and the post office began to think more seriously about the public not merely as citizens paying for postal services but as consumers buying government-issued souvenirs. With the postwar flowering of the consumer society, the post office issued more and more commemorative stamps. Since the iconography was intended to speak to issues of national history and identity, the consumer imperative of unlimited choice among similar alternatives came into tension with the democratic imperative of representing exemplary citizenship and its history"--
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.
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.
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