Paper Trails

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Western United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Offices ◽  
Communications Network ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mail Service ◽  
Government Institution ◽  
American State

Paper Trails presents a new history of the American state and its efforts to conquer, occupy, and integrate the western United States between the 1860s and early 1900s. The success of this project depended on an unassuming government institution: the US Post. As millions of settlers rushed into remote corners of the region, they relied on the mail to stay connected to the wider world. Letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders, all traveled across the most expansive communications network on earth. Paper Trails maps the year-by-year spread of this infrastructure using a dataset of more than one hundred thousand post offices, revealing a new and unfamiliar picture of the federal government in the West. Despite its size, the US Post was both nimble and ephemeral, rapidly spinning out its infrastructure to distant places before melting away at a moment’s notice. The administration of this network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions today. Instead, the US Post grafted public mail service onto the private operations of thousands of local businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry bags of mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. The postal network’s sprawling geography and localized operations force a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power. This book tells the story of one of the most dramatic reorganizations of people, land, and resources in American history and the underlying spatial circuitry that wove this project together.

Who Controls the Land? Lessons from Armed Takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grace A. Wang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Land Management ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Bureau Of Land Management ◽  
National Wildlife Refuge ◽  
The West ◽  
Wildlife Refuge ◽  
History Of

A heavily armed militia occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge from January 2 through February 21, 2016. The standoff began as a protest against the prosecution and incarceration of two local ranchers, although there has been a long-standing animus among some ranchers in the western United States. A brief history of the Bureau of Land Management lands is presented, with a focus on the management of grazing in the West. Some ranchers, such as Cliven Bundy of Nevada, have refused to pay grazing fees because of their profound hostility toward the federal government, and an earlier 2014 standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada, set the stage for the occupation at Malheur.

Postal Maps, 1860–83

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
American West ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Short Supply ◽  
The Us ◽  
Postal Network

During the 1860s and 1870s the US Post underwent a period of breakneck, unstable expansion in the western United States. Chapter 3 details the efforts of postal administrators to track all of these changes through a new mapmaking initiative under a cartographer named Walter Nicholson. The Topographer’s Office offers a window into the efforts of government officials in Washington, DC, to administer the nation’s western periphery. Nicholson’s postal maps were highly sought after across the federal government, offering valuable spatial information about the region that was often in short supply. Yet the struggles of Nicholson and his employees to keep pace with the never-ending flurry of changes to the region’s postal network is a testament to the ongoing barriers to centralized oversight imposed by the geography of the American West.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Max M. Edling
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
State System ◽  
State Governments ◽  
American Founding ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
American State

In recent years a new Unionist interpretation of the American founding has presented the US Constitution as a compact of union between sovereign states, which allowed them to maintain interstate peace and to act in unison as a single nation vis-à-vis other nations in the international state-system. Such an understanding of the American founding argues that the Constitution created a bisected American state divided into a federal government in charge of international and intraunion affairs and state governments in charge of promoting socioeconomic development and maintaining civic rights. The introduction provides an overview of different interpretations of the founding and of the structure of the book.

Mail Routes and the Costs of Expansion, 1866–83

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Public Infrastructure ◽  
The West ◽  
Agency Model ◽  
Administrative Capacity ◽  
The Us

Chapter 4 examines the transportation of mail in the western United States. During the 1860s and 1870s the Post Office Department contracted with private stagecoach companies to carry the mail on its behalf, allowing it to extend mail routes across the region without establishing its own costly public infrastructure. Government mail contracts effectively subsidized the western stagecoach industry and facilitated the region’s breakneck growth during these decades. But staging companies began to lobby, collude, and bribe their way into exorbitant contracts worth millions of dollars, and by the end of the 1870s the situation had devolved into a full-fledged institutional crisis. This chapter is a story about mismanagement, fraud, and corruption, but it also speaks to the federal government’s lack of centralized administrative capacity. The decentralized agency model may have allowed the US Post to rapidly spread across the West, but this frenetic regional expansion project came with considerable costs.

Introduction

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Fast Moving ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Digital History ◽  
Post Offices ◽  
The Us ◽  
Postal Network ◽  
American State

How did the American state consolidate its power over the vast and remote territory of the western United States? This chapter orients readers to the period of western expansion spanning the 1860s to the early 1900s and the crucial, often unseen, role of the US Post within this project. It explains the book’s methodology of using a dataset of more than one hundred thousand post offices to map the spread of the western postal network, part of a larger approach of digital history. This spatial analysis leads to four findings about the US Post and its status as a “gossamer network”: that it was big, spatially expansive, fast moving, and ephemeral. The chapter then introduces the concept of the agency model, a new organizational framework for understanding the American state. It concludes with an overview of the book’s chapter structure, major themes, and narrative strategies.

6. The watering of the West

2014 ◽  
pp. 78-93
Author(s):  
Stephen Aron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Western United States ◽  
National Bureau ◽  
The West ◽  
Bureau Of Reclamation ◽  
Irrigation Projects ◽  
To Come

‘The watering of the West’ describes the 1902 Reclamation Act (or Newlands Act) that established a National Bureau of Reclamation charged with constructing dams and irrigation projects in the western United States to reclaim the region from arid nature, open new lands for farmers, and restore the American dream for generations to come. The watering of the West required belief in new “scientific” propositions—many dubious—and entailed assigning added responsibilities to experts, often employed by the federal government, who took charge over not only the manipulation of western waters, but also the management of western lands and the regulation of other natural resources. This made westerners ever more dependent on federal stewardship and federal expenditures—and ever more resentful of federal oversight.

Perfecting the Union

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max M. Edling
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
American States ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

Habitually interpreted as the fundamental law of the American republic, the US Constitution was in fact designed as an instrument of union between thirteen American republics and as a form of government for their common central government. It offered an organizational solution to the security concerns of the newly independent American states. Confederation was an established means for weak states to maintain their independence by joining in union to manage relations with the outside world from a position of strength. Confederation also transformed the immediate international environment by turning neighboring states from potential enemies into sister states in a common union or peace pact. The US Constitution profoundly altered the structure of the American union and made the federal government more effective than under the defunct Articles of Confederation. But it did not transform the fundamental purpose of the federal union, which remained the management of relations between the American states, on the one hand, and between the American states and foreign powers, on the other. As had been the case under the articles, the states regulated the social, economic, and civic life of their citizens and inhabitants with only limited supervision and control from the federal government. This book demonstrates that interpreting the Constitution as an instrument of union has important implications for the understanding of the American founding. The Constitution mattered much more to the international than to the domestic history of the United States. Its importance to the latter was dwarfed by that of state constitutions and legislation.

The Post Office Window, 1880–92

Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 94-118
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins
Keyword(s):  
Post Office ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Agency Model ◽  
Post Offices ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Patronage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Administrative Oversight ◽  
Potential Customers

Chapter 5 focuses on the role of post offices and postmasters in western towns during the 1880s. Small-town post offices exemplified the US Post’s localized agency model at work, offering a much different perspective on the history of the American state than a traditional bureaucratic framework. Post offices defined the spatial practices of local communities. Whoever housed the post office on their premises enjoyed a regular stream of potential customers into their place of business. This made postmaster appointments highly sought-after positions that provided the main source of political patronage for whichever party controlled the presidency. There was no clear division between public and private space in local post offices, as postmasters simultaneously ran stores, sold magazine subscriptions, and acted as agents for telegraph and express companies. Finally, the agency model meant that post offices operated with little administrative oversight and routinely frustrated attempts at centralized reform.

scholarly journals Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Marten
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Threat Perceptions ◽  
Partnership For Peace ◽  
Nato Enlargement ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

AbstractThis article re-examines the history of NATO’s original post-Cold War enlargement to include the Visegrad states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. It uses both published materials and the author’s new interviews with key US and Russian policymakers, and employs robust qualitative counterfactual methods to ask two questions: whether there were any realistic alternatives to NATO enlargement, and whether NATO enlargement was responsible for the downturn in Russian relations with the West. It concludes that domestic politics were the dominant factors explaining policy directions on both the US and Russian sides; that NATO enlargement was probably inevitable given US domestic political factors and West European acquiescence; that Russia’s turn against the West preceded the NATO expansion discussion in the US; that the tenor of the Russian turn is explained by status concerns rather than military threat perceptions, and that it was aggravated most by Western unilateral airstrikes rather than NATO’s geographical enlargement; and that the one policy initiative that might have realistically slowed NATO enlargement if it had been adopted differently, Partnership for Peace, did not affect those Russian status concerns and thus could not have redirected the relationship.

How Science, Religion, and Politics Influence Indigenous Attitudes on Climate Change in Ecuador

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-178
Author(s):  
Todd A. Eisenstadt ◽  
Karleen Jones West
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The West ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Change Beliefs

To assess the influence of science and religion on climate change, in this chapter we analyze our national survey focused on climate change in Ecuador and find that with regard to climate change specifically, religiosity and indigenous cosmovision impact respondents’ belief in climate change. Contrary to the US-centered literature on religious beliefs and climate change in the West, religiosity and cosmovision have positive effects on climate change beliefs. Recognizing that possession of an indigenous cosmovision and a Catholic or Protestant religious identity are not incompatible, we also consider how these traits interact. In addition to being influenced by both science and religion, respondents adjust their beliefs in climate change depending on whether they were located on the nation’s extractive frontier. We also show with case studies that science, religion, and a history of extractivism all impact citizen beliefs in climate change.

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