Outsourcing the Postal Service: Reconceptualizing the State through Geospatial Digital History

Abstract

Cameron Blevins has crafted a shining masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship with Paper Trails: The U.S. Post and the Making of the American West. Blevins contributes a broad reassessment of the state’s role, structure, and reach by leveraging traditional archival research and innovative geospatial digital history methods to study the rapid proliferation of postal services in the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century AmericanWest. However, Blevins’s brilliance lies in his expert balance of broad, sweeping analysis and detailed social history. Paper Trails is not just a story about data and state functions but also a chronicle about ordinary people whose lives were impacted by accessibility to the largest-scale postal service in the world. Blevins illustrates how the U.S. Postal Service facilitated the flow of personal messages, commerce, news, andmoney through the vast expanses of the western United States while also aiding the destructive colonization of Native American lands as the “underlying spatial circuitry of westward expansion” (3). Blevins successfully argues that the triumph of an accessible federal postal service in a rapidly expanding American frontier was not due to a rigidly centralized bureaucracy but rather the postal system’s decentralized flexibility. Blevins argues that postal decentralization, characterized by an agency model of public-private partnerships, local agents, and contractors, enabled the rapid development of postal services essential to the nation’s periphery through outsourced employees, transportation, and postal facilities. Throughout Paper Trails, Blevins effectually examines overarching historical themes surrounding the unique nature of the American postal system and the functions of the agencymodel of administration to effectively bolster his argument for the importance of a dynamic “Gossamer Network” postal system defined by intersectionality that blurred public and private spheres (1). Blevins structures his chapters thematically. He employs maps, charts, and captivatingly written narratives to illustrate his data, examine broad