The American Stamp

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.

Laura Goldblatt is an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Richard Handler is professor of anthropology and global studies at the University of Virginia.

Davarian Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities:
Given email, supply chain setbacks, and fears of mail-in ballot corruption, many would consider a stamp the relic of a dying era. But Goldblatt and Handler powerfully bring the stamp back to life as an unrecognized measure of American democracy’s future and not just its past. In The American Stamp we find a timely and historically rigorous examination of the consumer republic and its limits.

Pauline Turner Strong, author of American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries:
Goldblatt and Handler offer an original and well documented interpretation of U.S. postage stamps that will be of interest to a wide array of audiences: stamp collectors and postal historians, to be sure, but also anyone interested in the construction and transformation of U.S. citizenship, consumerism, and popular representation. This book makes a fascinating and important contribution to the literature on nationalism, citizenship, and collecting.

Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism:
The American Stamp describes in layered detail how postage stamps perform the “ideological magic” of making one people out of all these raced, classed, and gendered addresses and pieces of paper. It is materialist analysis at its most unforgettable.

Elizabeth Chin, author of My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries:
In this thrilling account of United States postage stamps, Goldblatt and Handler show us that enduring national myths are inextricably bound up with racial segregation, settler colonialism, and consumerism. Beautifully written and compellingly argued, this book shows that the United States postage stamp is as complex, fraught, and contradictory as the nation itself.