Revisions of Stamping American Memory

Building Philatelic Communities, Conclusion

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Stamp collectors and philatelists built an international community in the late nineteenth century by formalizing the practices related to saving, circulating, and discussing their favorite objects through clubs and the circulation of hundreds of stamp papers. Importantly, The United States Post Office Department (USPOD) noticed those connections. By the 1890s, the USPOD began a commemorative stamp program knowing there was a ready audience of collectors and individuals interested in saving stamps and the meanings associated with those objects. When printing its first set of limited-issue commemorative stamps, the USPOD began to see collectors, and citizens, as consumers with money to spend, even if it was only two-cents at a time. The Department expanded its already close relationship with Americans by encouraging them to purchase and save US commemoratives as patriotic souvenirs. Stamps circulated widely when printed. When collected, saved, and displayed, stamps were looked at repeatedly. These images, albeit small in size, were not fleeting or insignificant, but rather were transformed by their collectors into miniature memorials to an idealized American past. These early collectors from the late nineteenth century influenced the growth of the USPOD’s very popular program of commemorating people, events, and places from the American past and present on stamps.