Everyone has a story about the Post Office. Sometimes the story is endearing—the mail carrier who becomes like a member of the family and brings treats for the dog every day. Sometimes it is a cautionary tale of bureaucracy run amok. Either way, the ubiquity of interactions with the Post Office marks its centrality in American life. Yet for scholars, that presence means that the postal system can be easy to overlook when they examine government and society. Or to put it another way, “when something is everywhere, it can start to become invisible” (4), as Cameron Blevins introduces the postal system in Paper Trails. A stunning work of scholarship, Paper Trails explores how the US Post Office shaped the American West and the federal government's structure during the nineteenth century.
The key, according to Blevins, is that the postal system created a “gossamer network,” a metaphor that suffuses...