A groundbreaking history of how the US Post made the nineteenth-century American West.
There were five times as many post offices in the United States in 1899 than there are McDonald's restaurants today. During an era of supposedly limited federal government, the United States operated the most expansive national postal system in the world.
In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late nineteenth-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. It had taken Anglo-Americans the better part of two hundred years to occupy the eastern half of the continent, yet they occupied the West within a single generation. 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.
1 有用 地下宇航员 2021-06-16 16:27:48
9/10. 19世纪美国尤其西部的邮局长是计件收费的合同工,职位报酬微薄却很抢手(主要是地方小店主希望给自己的店引流),常成为政党恩庇网络的分配对象。这样一个看似混乱无组织的机构,却在西部扩张史上起到了至关重要的作用。看这书套路有点熟悉,一查果然是Richard White的学生。和White写跨州铁路的书思路类似,从西部交通通讯“基础设施”着手看19世纪美国,把一个看似严丝合缝机器的扩张还原成一... 9/10. 19世纪美国尤其西部的邮局长是计件收费的合同工,职位报酬微薄却很抢手(主要是地方小店主希望给自己的店引流),常成为政党恩庇网络的分配对象。这样一个看似混乱无组织的机构,却在西部扩张史上起到了至关重要的作用。看这书套路有点熟悉,一查果然是Richard White的学生。和White写跨州铁路的书思路类似,从西部交通通讯“基础设施”着手看19世纪美国,把一个看似严丝合缝机器的扩张还原成一个无组织的去中心化的过程,敲打敲打一些经典的社科理论和历史叙事(Blevins的靶子是韦伯的理性官僚),讨论讨论铁路/邮政发展对美国政治和经济均衡的后续影响。两本书比较一下其实更喜欢学生的:经验材料采集呈现更系统和量化;分析框架更明确;判断和结论没有overstretched,没有老学阀的傲慢。 (展开)