The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia Select Papers, 2010-2011

The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia Select Papers, 2010-2011 PDF Author: Thomas M. Lera
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Postage stamps
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Rarely do scholars of postal organizations and systems meet and discuss their ideas and research with scholars of philately. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the National Postal Museum and the American Philatelic Society hosted the first Winton M. Blount Postal History symposium on 3-4 November 2006 to bring together these two research groups to discuss postal history. This publication covers the next two symposia. The 2010 theme was "Stamps and the Mail: Images, Icons and Identity." Stamps, as official government documents, can be treated as primary resources designed to convey specific political and esthetic messages. Other topics and themes for the symposium were stamp design's influence on advertising envelopes and bulk mailings, censorship of stamps as propaganda as used on letters, and the role of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee or organizations that generate the designs. The 2011 symposium was held at the American Philatelic Center in conjunction with the United States Stamp Society's annual meeting. The United States Stamp Society is the preeminent organization devoted to the study of U.S. stamps. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run association of collectors to promote the study of the philatelic output of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and of postage and revenue stamped paper produced by others for use in the United States and U.S. administered areas. The theme of the symposium was "How Commerce and Industry Shaped the Mails."

The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia Select Papers, 2010-2011

The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia Select Papers, 2010-2011 PDF Author: Thomas M. Lera
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Postage stamps
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rarely do scholars of postal organizations and systems meet and discuss their ideas and research with scholars of philately. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the National Postal Museum and the American Philatelic Society hosted the first Winton M. Blount Postal History symposium on 3-4 November 2006 to bring together these two research groups to discuss postal history. This publication covers the next two symposia. The 2010 theme was "Stamps and the Mail: Images, Icons and Identity." Stamps, as official government documents, can be treated as primary resources designed to convey specific political and esthetic messages. Other topics and themes for the symposium were stamp design's influence on advertising envelopes and bulk mailings, censorship of stamps as propaganda as used on letters, and the role of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee or organizations that generate the designs. The 2011 symposium was held at the American Philatelic Center in conjunction with the United States Stamp Society's annual meeting. The United States Stamp Society is the preeminent organization devoted to the study of U.S. stamps. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run association of collectors to promote the study of the philatelic output of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and of postage and revenue stamped paper produced by others for use in the United States and U.S. administered areas. The theme of the symposium was "How Commerce and Industry Shaped the Mails."

The American Stamp

The American Stamp PDF Author: Laura Goldblatt
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231557337
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia

The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia PDF Author: Thomas M. Lera
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Government publications
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
"Rarely do scholars of postal organizations and systems meet and discuss their ideas and research with scholars of philately. In an attempt to bridge this gap, the National Postal Museum and the American Philatelic Society hosted the first Winton M. Blount Postal History symposium on 3-4 November 2006 to bring together these two research groups to discuss postal history. This publication covers the next two symposia. The 2010 theme was "Stamps and the Mail: Images, Icons and Identity." Stamps, as official government documents, can be treated as primary resources designed to convey specific political and esthetic messages. Other topics and themes for the symposium were stamp design's influence on advertising envelopes and bulk mailings, censorship of stamps as propaganda as used on letters, and the role of the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee or organizations that generate the designs. The 2011 symposium was held at the American Philatelic Center in conjunction with the United States Stamp Society's annual meeting. The United States Stamp Society is the preeminent organization devoted to the study of U.S. stamps. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run association of collectors to promote the study of the philatelic output of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and of postage and revenue stamped paper produced by others for use in the United States and U.S. administered areas."--Publisher's website.

Postcards

Postcards PDF Author: Lydia Pyne
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178914485X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
A global exploration of postcards as artifacts at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections—links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.

Stamps, Nationalism and Political Transition

Stamps, Nationalism and Political Transition PDF Author: Stanley D Brunn
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000628981
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
This book explores how states in political transition use stamps to promote a new visual nationalism. Stamps as products of the state and provide small pieces of information about a state’s heritage, culture, economies and place in the world. These depictions change over time, reflecting political and cultural changes and developments. The volume explores the transition times in more than a dozen countries from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. Specifically addressed are the stamp topics, issues and themes in the years before and after such major changes occurred, for example, from a European colony to political independence or from a dictatorship to democracy. The authors compare the personalities, histories, and cultural representations "before" the transition period and how the state used the "after" event to define or redefine its place on the world political map. The final three chapters consider international themes on many stamp issues, one being stamps with Disney cartoon characters, another on "themeless" Forever stamps, and the third on states celebrating women and their accomplishments. This volume has wide interdisciplinary relevance and should prove of particular interest to those studying geopolitics, political transition, visual nationalism, soft power and visual representations of decolonializing.

Immigrants and Comics

Immigrants and Comics PDF Author: Nhora Lucía Serrano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317287673
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Immigrants and Comics is an interdisciplinary, themed anthology that focuses on how comics have played a crucial role in representing, constructing, and reifying the immigrant subject and the immigrant experience in popular global culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nhora Lucía Serrano and a diverse group of contributors examine immigrant experience as they navigate new socio-political milieux in cartoons, comics, and graphic novels across cultures and time periods. They interrogate how immigration is portrayed in comics and how the ‘immigrant’ was an indispensable and vital trope to the development of the comics medium in the twentieth century. At the heart of the book‘s interdisciplinary nexus is a critical framework steeped in the ideas of remembrance and commemoration, what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Ethnic Studies, Francophone Studies, American Studies, Hispanic Studies, art history, and museum studies.

The One-Cent Magenta

The One-Cent Magenta PDF Author: James Barron
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616207175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
An inside look at the obsessive, secretive, and often bizarre world of high-profile stamp collecting, told through the journey of the world’s most sought-after stamp. When it was issued in 1856, it cost a penny. In 2014, this tiny square of faded red paper sold at Sotheby’s for nearly $9.5 million, the largest amount ever paid for a postage stamp at auction. Through the stories of the eccentric characters who have bought, owned, and sold the one-cent magenta in the years in between, James Barron delivers a fascinating tale of global history and immense wealth, and of the human desire to collect. One-cent magentas were provisional stamps, printed quickly in what was then British Guiana when a shipment of official stamps from London did not arrive. They were intended for periodicals, and most were thrown out with the newspapers. But one stamp survived. The singular one-cent magenta has had only nine owners since a twelve-year-old boy discovered it in 1873 as he sorted through papers in his uncle’s house. He soon sold it for what would be $17 today. (That’s been called the worst stamp deal in history.) Among later owners was a fabulously wealthy Frenchman who hid the stamp from almost everyone (even King George V of England couldn’t get a peek); a businessman who traveled with the stamp in a briefcase he handcuffed to his wrist; and John E. du Pont, an heir to the chemical fortune, who died while serving a thirty-year sentence for the murder of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz. Recommended for fans of Nicholas A. Basbanes, Susan Orlean, and Simon Winchester, The One-Cent Magenta explores the intersection of obsessive pursuits and great affluence and asks why we want most what is most rare.

Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898

Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898 PDF Author: L. Rotunno
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137323809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. Postal Plots explores how Victorian postal reforms unleashed a new and sometimes unruly population into the Victorian literary marketplace where they threatened the definition and development of the Victorian literary professional.

Techniques of Illusion

Techniques of Illusion PDF Author: Katharina Rein
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000891488
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
This book explores stage conjuring during its “golden age,” from about 1860 to 1910. This study provides close readings highlighting four paradigmatic illusions of the time that stand in for different kinds of illusions typical of stage magic in the “golden age” and analyses them within their cultural and media-historical context: “Pepper’s Ghost,” the archetypical mirror illusion; “The Vanishing Lady,” staging a teleportation in a time of a dizzying acceleration of transport; “the levitation,” simulating weightlessness with the help of an extended steel machinery; and “The Second Sight,” a mind-reading illusion using up-to-date communication technologies. These close readings are completed by writings focusing on visual media and expanding the scope backwards and forwards in time, roughly to 1800 and to 2000. This exploration will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.

First Class

First Class PDF Author: Christopher W. Shaw
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868559
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Investigating the essential role that the postal system plays in American democracy and how the corporate sector has attempted to destroy it. "With First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, Christopher Shaw makes a brilliant case for polishing the USPS up and letting it shine in the 21st century."—John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation and author of Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis "First Class is essential reading for all postal workers and for our allies who seek to defend and strengthen our public Postal Service."—Mark Dimondstein, President, American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO The fight over the future of the U.S. Postal Service is on. For years, corporate interests and political ideologues have pushed to remake the USPS, turning it from a public institution into a private business—and now, with mail-in voting playing a key role in local, state, and federal elections, the attacks have escalated. Leadership at the USPS has been handed over to special interests whose plan for the future includes higher postage costs, slower delivery times, and fewer post offices, policies that will inevitably weaken this invaluable public service and source of employment. Despite the general shift to digital communication, the vast majority of the American people—and small businesses—still rely heavily on the U.S. postal system, and many are rallying to defend it. First Class brings readers to the front lines of the struggle, explaining the various forces at work for and against a strong postal system, and presenting reasonable ideas for strengthening and expanding its capacity, services, and workforce. Emphasizing the essential role the USPS has played ever since Benjamin Franklin served as our first Postmaster General, author Christopher Shaw warns of the consequences for the country—and for our democracy—if we don’t win this fight. Praise for First Class: Piece by piece, an essential national infrastructure is being dismantled without our consent. Shaw makes an eloquent case for why the post office is worth saving and why, for the sake of American democracy, it must be saved."—Steve Hutkins, founder/editor of Save the Post Office and Professor of English at New York University "The USPS is essential for a democratic American society; thank goodness we have this new book from Christopher W. Shaw explaining why."—Danny Caine, author of Save the USPS and owner of the Raven Book Store, Lawrence, KS "Shaw's excellent analysis of the Postal Service and its vital role in American Democracy couldn't be more timely. … First Class should serve as a clarion call for Americans to halt the dismantling and to, instead, preserve and enhance the institution that can bind the nation together."—Ruth Y. Goldway, Retired Chair and Commissioner, U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, responsible for the Forever Stamps "In a time of community fracture and corporate predation, Shaw argues, a first-class post office of the future can bring communities together and offer exploitation-free banking and other services."—Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen