Cameron Blevins - Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blevins, Cameron, author.

Title: Paper trails : the US Post and the making of the American West / Cameron Blevins.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2020033035 (print) | LCCN 2020033036 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190053673 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780190053697 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Postal serviceWest (U.S.)History19th century. |

United StatesTerritorial expansion | West (U.S.)History

Classification: LCC HE6376.A1 W476 2021 (print) | LCC HE6376.A1 (ebook) |

DDC 383/.497809034dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033035

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033036

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190053673.001.0001

Ive been lucky enough to work at a series of wonderful institutions. This book began while I was a graduate student at Stanford University, where I learned from Jim Campbell, Gordon Chang, Zephyr Frank, Estelle Friedman, Annelise Heinz, Ryan Heuser, Allyson Hobbs, Ben Hoy, Matt Jockers, Gabriel Lee, Natalie Marine-Street, Sara Mayeux, Casey Nichols, Andy Robichaud, Scott Spillman, Erik Steiner, Ben Stone, Caroline Winterer, and Glen Worthey. The Spatial History Lab, the Literary Lab, and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis provided community and institutional support, while the Bill Lane Center for the American West supported my final year of graduate school. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded a one-year postdoc at the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University, where I benefited from the mentorship of Ann Fabian, Francesca Giannetti, Toby Jones, and Jamie Pietruska. Christof Mauch welcomed me as a visiting scholar at the incomparable Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, which gave me the opportunity to wrestle my dissertation into a book. I finished working on the book at Northeastern University, where I enjoyed some truly exceptional colleagues, including Moya Bailey, Marty Blatt, Victoria Cain, Sarah Connell, Ryan Cordell, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Julia Flanders, Gretchen Heefner, Laura Nelson, lika Ortega, Chris Parsons, Bahare Sanaie-Movahed, Heather Streets-Salter, Ben Schmidt, Philip Thai, and Louise Walker. Finally, thank you to the people who kept all of these institutions running: Celena Allen, Kirsten Bilas, Matt Bryant, Carmen Dines, Shari Haun, Arielle Helmick, Bonne Knipfer, Art Palmon, Lynn Shanko, Priscilla Trojino, and Monica Wheeler.

Like any work of history, this one was only possible because of libraries, archives, and the talented people who work in them. I benefited in particular from Alexander Library, the Bancroft Library, the Beinecke Library, the California State Library, Green Library, the Huntington Library, the National Archives, and Snell Library. Historians like to fetishize physical archives over digital ones, but I spent just as many hours researching this book in the virtual spaces of the California Digital Newspaper Collection, the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, the Library of Congresss Chronicling America database, Google Books, HathiTrust, and Wikipedia.

Thank you to my editor, Susan Ferber, for her sharp eye and for guiding this project through the entire publication process. The production team at Oxford did exceptional work with copy-editing, indexing, and laying out such an unreasonable number of figures. I am grateful to Richard Helbock, whose research and data collection made so much of my research possible. Many thanks to Zephyr Frank and Caroline Winterer, who were instrumental in the early stages of this project as dissertation readers and mentors. A series of talented research assistants contributed to this project: Tara Balakrishnan, Jenny Barin, Dina Hassan, Jocelyn Hickox, Alex Ramsey, and Varun Vijay. Jason Heppler patiently worked with me to create an interactive visualization of post offices that has proven endlessly helpful over the years. Steven Braun provided consulting for the accompanying online narrative for this book, and a seedling grant from the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks helped me hire someone to actually build it: Yan Wu, who is the single most talented designer Ive ever met. Many thanks to Richard R. John for his groundbreaking work on this topic and for providing a wealth of ideas, contacts, sources, and suggestions over the years. Patty Limerick wrote a truly unforgettable review of my manuscript and helped shepherd the book to completion. Victoria Cain swooped in like the superhero that she is to drag me across the finish line. Finally, this book joins countless others that were made possible by the mentorship of Richard White. Richard has influenced the book and my career in too many ways to list, so Ill keep this as succinct as one of his emails: thank you.

Acknowledgments often use some variation of any of this books flaws or shortcomings are entirely my own. I have the same attitude toward my parents and sister for the way they raised me; any flaws or shortcomings are entirely my own. My mom in particular taught me much of what I know about how to be a teacher, scholar, and colleague. I appreciate the many friends in my life who indulged my need to not talk or think about this book when I wasnt working on it. Most of them have only the vaguest sense of what its about, and I am a much happier person because of it. This project began around the same time as my relationship with Erica. A decade later, one of them has ended while the other continues to be the single best part of my life. Thank you.

Paper Trails is a work of digital history, a field that revolves around the use of computational methods to understand the past. This approach produced new findings and interpretations about the nineteenth-century American state and the western United States, while also allowing me to communicate those findings through maps, charts, and other data visualizations. In the interests of readability, I have tried to avoid detailed technical discussions about the data and methods of this approach within the main text of the book.

Many of the maps in this book rely on a particular dataset: post office records transcribed by the philatelist and postal historian Richard Helbock. The Post Office Department recorded the names of all post offices in the country and the dates for when they were established, discontinued, or reopened along with any time they changed names. The vast majority of this information is housed by the National Archives through microfilmed Records of Appointment of Postmasters. Helbock spent years poring over these records and consulting other local sources in order to build a dataset of every post office that existed in the United States, including their names, the states and counties in which they were located, and their dates of operation. Helbock passed away in 2011, two years before I discovered his work and purchased a CD-ROM of the dataset from his wife, Catherine Clark. I am indebted to Helbock, without whom this book would have been impossible.