Paper Trails

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West argues that the US Post wove together two of the era’s defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, the western United States underwent a dramatic reorganization of people, land, capital, and resources. As millions of settlers moved into the region, they relied on letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders to stay connected to the wider world. Paper Trails maps the spread of the US Post using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new picture of the federal government in the West.

The western postal network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions. Instead, the US Post grafted public mail service onto private businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry the mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. These arrangements allowed the US Post to operate what I’ve termed a “gossamer network,” rapidly spinning out a vast and ephemeral web of postal infrastructure to thousands of distant places. The postal network’s sprawling geography and localized operations forces a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power.

• Winner of the 2023 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Winner of the 2022 Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction
• Winner of the 2022 National Postal Museum Award for Scholarship in Postal History
• Runner-Up, 2022 Outstanding Western Book Award, WTAMU Center for the Study of the American West
• Explore the companion website “Gossamer Network” to see the spread of thousands of post offices across the western United States.
• Read more about the underlying dataset behind the book.
• Paper Trails is available for purchase through Oxford University Press, Bookshop.org, or Amazon.
• Contact me if you are interested in scheduling a talk, interview, or conversation about my work.

Reviews

“A stunning work of scholarship.” – Joseph M. Adelman, The New England Quarterly

“Paper Trails elegantly employs digital history tools and spatial analysis methods to explain how the United States extended federal authority over the American West.” – Tona Hangen, Journal of American History

“A wonderful example of digital history built on information technology and archival research.” – Marc Levinson, Wall Street Journal

“Paper Trails represents the leading edge of digital history.” – Sean Fraga, American Historical Review

“Cameron Blevins has produced a study so methodologically and empirically rich that it sets a model for disciplines beyond history.” – Daniel Carpenter, author of Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870

“Paper Trails will make you see state power in entirely new ways.” – Rachel St. John, University of California, Davis

“With the intensity and range of Blevins’s research, the clarity and vigor of his writing style, and, most of all, his distinctive perspective on the relationship between the history of the American West and the history of the federal government, this book gains the status of a fresh appraisal of the arrangements of power and population in the West and in the nation as a whole.” – Patricia Nelson Limerick, author of Legacy of Conquest

“In the hands of Cameron Blevins, isolated post offices become windows into life in the American West. With great skill, Blevins portrays the expansive growth of the American state in an original, surprising, and persuasive way.” – Edward L. Ayers, winner of the Bancroft Prize

“’Paper Trails’ offers a timely reminder that the post has always been political….One of the most striking aspects of ‘Paper Trails’ isn’t in the book. Mr Blevins is a digital historian, meaning he uses data science to analyse historical trends. He built an accompanying website replete with interactive maps to show readers how, within a generation, the postal service helped colonise a continent. These online dispatches beautifully illustrate the formative power of snail mail.” – The Economist

“The most satisfying dimension of this impressive research is the persistent quest to integrate history and geography…forcing us to see the American West in new terms.” – Susan Schulten, The Journal of the Civil War Era

“By combining modern digital mapping techniques with traditional archival research, Blevins shows how postal policy can help us better understand the rise of the modern American state.” – Richard R. John, author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse

“Perhaps not since Miracle on 34th Street extolled the United States Postal Service for exonerating Santa Claus has an in-depth examination of post office history been so interesting as Cameron Blevins’s Paper Trails.” – Michael A. Amundson, Environmental History Review

“Of particular note is his use of digital history documentation to compile original and thought-provoking computational models of data….Equally effective is the personalization of the postal narrative through detailed accounts of how the U.S. Post was vital to individuals and families caught up in the complexities and uncertainties of westward expansion.” – Dan K. Utley, Southwestern Historical Quarterly

“A product of the relatively new subfield of digital history, this study also draws on extensive data sets, maps, and scores of archival records to create a remarkable textual and visual record based on spatial analysis of an immense and sprawling federal apparatus.” – Keith Egerton, Choice

“Paper Trails is an essential contribution to our understanding of the machinery of nineteenth-century settler colonialism as a spatial phenomenon and of cartography as an imperial state-building enterprise,” Jesse R. Andrews, Historical Geography

“Cameron Blevins has crafted a shining masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship.” – Robert O’Dell III, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

“Paper Trails reads mostly as narrative history, but Blevins pauses strategically to explain his theory of power and why it matters. He does this effortlessly, which is a testament to the book’s prose and its considered conceptualization.” –Emma Teitelman, Western Historical Quarterly

“The value of Paper Trails extends far beyond its lessons about state power.” –David Henkin, The History Teacher

Coverage

Jeff Bloodworth, “How mailmen saved rural America” UnHerd (November 25, 2024).

“Cameron Blevins - The U.S. Post And The Making Of The American West” KALA Radio (January 14, 2023).

“How the Postal Service Helped America Conquer Its Western Frontier” Mailin’ It: The Official USPS Podcast (January 3, 2023)

Dax Jacobson, Cameron Blevins (Historian and Author) on His Book “Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West” The Rural Towns Project (April 17, 2022).

“Paper Trails” CSPAN: American History TV (November 11, 2021).

George Spencer, “Westward PO” Pomona College Magazine (September 30, 2021).

Hillary Predko, “A conversation with Cameron Blevins on the operational history of the USPS” The Prepared (August 11, 2021).

“‘Paper Trails’ Explores How The U.S. Postal Service Helped Shape The American West” Colorado Public Radio (July 21, 2021).

Mark A. Kellner, “Book Review: Paper Trails” Washington Times (June 16, 2021).

“The postal service enabled America’s westward expansion” The Economist (June 5, 2021).

“How the west was won. Not by guns, but by the Postal Service” Federal News Network (May 28, 2021).

David Luhrssen, “Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West,” Shepherd Express (May 27, 2021).

“How Should the US Post Office Function in 2021?” Keen On Podcast (April 28, 2021).

Laura Bliss, “How the U.S. Postal Service Forever Changed the West” Bloomberg City Lab (April 21, 2021).

Dan Cohen, “Humane Ingenuity 37: Data and the Humanities” Humane Ingenuity (April 7, 2021).

Tyler Cowen, “What I’ve Been Reading” Marginal Revolution (April 6, 2021).

Next With Kyle Clark, “What did the postal service have to do with colonialism in Colorado?” Denver 9News (April 6, 2021).

Marc Levinson, “‘Paper Trails’ Review: Go West, Young Mailman” The Wall Street Journal (March 24, 2021).

Elizabeth Lindqwister, “What’s the Big Deal About the Post Office?” Stanford Magazine (March 2021).

“Digital and spatial history are brought to bear on the settlement of the West” Kirkus Reviews (February 2021).