[Linganth] Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler's book on US stamps

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog we feature Polly Strong's conversation with Laura
Goldblatt and Richard Handler, discussing their new book on US stamps.

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: 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.
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