‘Your’s Truly’: The Creation and Consumption of Commercial Tourist Portraits

There is a long history of tourists substantiating their visits to a destination through the purchase of portraits that show them against a backdrop of the local setting. While its initial expression in the form of paintings was confined to the social elite who could afford to commission and sit for an artist, the advent of photography democratized the process, enabling the aspiring middle classes to partake in the custom. While some tourists took their own photographs, the majority relied on local photographers who offered their services in studio and open-air settings. Smaller-sized images, such as Cartes de Visite (2.5″ × 4″) and Cabinet Cards (4.5″ × 6.5″), could be enclosed with letters to family and social circles, thus providing proof of visits while the voyage was still in progress. The development of picture postcards as a postal item in the 1890s, coupled with the manufacture of precut photographic paper with preprinted address fields, revolutionized tourist portraiture. Photographers could set-up outside tourist attractions, where tourists could have their portrait taken with formulaic framing against a canonized background. Efficient production flows meant that tourists could pick up their printed portraits, ready for mailing within an hour. Using examples of San Marc’s Basilica in Venice (Italy), as well as Ostrich Farms in California and Florida (U.S.A.), this paper contextualizes the production and consumption of such commercial tourist portraits as objects of social validation. It discusses their ability to situate the visitor in locales iconic of the destination, substantiating their presence and validating their experience. Given the speed of production (within an hour) and their ability to be immediately mailed through the global postal network, such images were the precursor of the modern-day ‘selfies’ posted on social media.

APPLICATION OF GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE POSTAL NETWORK ANALYSIS

The postal network is a comprehensive set of several subsets, namely, postal infrastructure (consisted of objects and means), transportation networks, and human resources. It is organized by specific considerations of every country, following practices outlined by national and international regulation. Geographic Information System is a tool specialized for spatial data and network analysis. It can help identify shortcomings in a network environment, conditioned by a specific set of criteria and provisions. Spatial data and characteristics of the postal network are taken into consideration. The research area’s transportation infrastructure and administrative data are also needed for quality analysis of the postal network. The application of GIS in this paper is made following one County’s example in the Republic of Croatia.

Postal Maps, 1860–83

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

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.

Rural Free Delivery, 1896–1913

In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Post Office Department launched an unprecedented spatial reorganization of its postal network: Rural Free Delivery, when mail carriers started delivering mail to the doorsteps of individual homes. Chapter 7 details the rollout of Rural Free Delivery, which was put into motion through an alliance between department administrators and agrarian reformers. This initiative triggered a spatial and administrative shift in the US Post, as it altered the geography of the network while ushering in a more recognizably modern bureaucracy made up of professional civil servants. But mapping the spread of the service reveals that Rural Free Delivery did not initially extend to the rural West. There, the older agency model would continue to define mail service well into the twentieth century.

Stories and Structures

Chapter 2 follows the story of four siblings as they migrated westward and the role of the US Post in their lives. From the time they were orphaned as children in Ohio, the postal network connected Sarah, Jamie, Delia, and Benjamin Curtis across space. The Curtis siblings joined a migratory wave of people that washed across the western United States during the late 19th century. No matter where they moved, from a railway line on the central plains to a mill town in northern California to a backcountry ranch in Arizona, they could rely on the US Post’s expansive infrastructure to communicate with each other. Across dozens of surviving letters, the US Post’s structural power comes into focus, giving meaning to how its institutional arrangements and wider geography shaped everyday experiences and conditions in the 19th-century West.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter offers an overview of the US Post and the wider federal government from the early 1900s to the present. Both the US Post and the American state became more centralized and bureaucratic during the 20th century, but elements of the agency model and the challenges of American geography have continued to shape governance through the present. Today, the federal government’s “indirect” workforce outnumbers its “direct” workforce of salaried employees, while the US Postal Service’s ongoing fiscal crisis has seen the re-emergence of elements of the 19th-century postal network and its localized, semi-privatized workforce. The book concludes with lessons that the 19th-century postal system holds for understanding the kind of structural power wielded by technology companies and other large-scale forces that shape American society today.

Redefining the number of postal network units according to the alternative scenario

This paper presents a potential solution to the issue of redefining the postal network, for the needs of an alternative reference scenario, using the DEA method. The authors use an integrated approach to analyze the cost efficiency of the postal network, which implies a separate consideration of the cost efficiency of delivery and non-delivery units of the network. The results obtained by combining the DEA method and the integrated approach can be useful for setting up and validating alternative scenario hypotheses, resulting in a redefined postal network.

A MODEL FOR PUBLIC POSTAL NETWORK REORGANIZATION BASED ON DEA AND FUZZY APPROACH

One of the most important segments in management of Universal Service Providers (USPs) is reaching the decisions concerning changes in the postal network infrastructure. USPs decide on such matters based on an analysis of financial indicators and defined qualitative parameters in accordance with the international regulations and obligations imposed by a competent regulatory agency. In this paper, the previously known method to analyse the existing postal network and define the minimal number of Postal Network Units (PNU) is implemented and upgraded by a new approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and fuzzy logic. The final aim of the proposed new approach is to determine which of the considered PNU should be closed or reorganized having in mind the minimization of negative effects, both financial and social. The proposed model gives the indices for all considered postal branches, which allows the decision-maker to rank the importance of each unit. The proposed model is a business intelligence tool, which replaces a multidisciplinary team composed from managers of the company and policymakers from both the postal sector as well as a sustainable rural development sector in reaching an important decision on changing the postal network. This decision may be considered as extremely complex since it should sublimate the opposed criteria that relate to the business success of the company, state regulations and sustainability of the local community. The indices obtained in the proposed method exactly include the mentioned three categories. The authors demonstrate the applicability of the suggested methodology based on the real data acquired in a district of the Serbia, i.e. in a regional organizational entity of the USP and provide the analysis of the results reached for the rural delivery post offices.