Paper Trails

Cameron Blevins’s Paper Trails is a creative, sophisticated history of the U.S. Post in the late nineteenth-century West. Weaving together social and spatial history, the book offers two complementary interventions. One is methodological, challenging critics who maintain that digital methods merely dress up history we already knew. The other addresses debates about the U.S. state, moving beyond the categories of “strong” versus “weak” to offer fresh insight on state power in the nineteenth century. By mapping where the state operated and who made it function, Blevins identifies the U.S. Post as one of the most important federal institutions undergirding the rapid settlement and integration of the West in this period. Western historians have looked to the Interior and War Departments as primary forces in that story, but the Post was just as crucial. It was, in fact, the most ubiquitous institution occupying the Trans-Mississippi West. It operated quietly in the background, exerting meaningful influence over the everyday lives of millions of people.

Aesthetics · Art · Institution · Period (music) · Power (physics) · Settlement (finance) · Social history (medicine) · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Weaving · World Wide Web · American History and Culture · Computer Science · Engineering · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine