In this episode of "Keen On", Andrew is joined by Cameron Blevins, the author of "Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West", to discuss how the US Post wove together two of the era of supposedly limited federal government's defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power.
Cameron Blevins teaches United States history and digital humanities at the University of Colorado Denver. Prior to this, Blevins was an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and core faculty member of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His book, "Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West" (Oxford University Press, 2021), presents a spatial interpretation of the nineteenth-century American state by mapping the sprawling infrastructure of the nation’s postal network. Some of Blevins' broader interests include geography, communications, gender history, and information visualization.
Cameron Blevins on a New Perspective on the Postal Service