{"id":370,"date":"2014-03-14T03:40:08","date_gmt":"2014-03-14T03:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stampingamericanmemory.org\/?page_id=370"},"modified":"2014-03-14T03:40:08","modified_gmt":"2014-03-14T03:40:08","slug":"learning-to-read-stamps","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/learning-to-read-stamps\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to Read Stamps"},"content":{"rendered":"

O Mary found a little stamp,
\nA rarity, conceded.
\nIn fact \u2019twas just the very one
\nHer dear old daddy needed.
\nIt also chanced, this wondrous stamp,
\nThat Mary did discover a
\nRare Patriotic Cover.<\/p>\n

Now, Mary knowing that her dad
\nLiked stamps found in a garret,
\nMade haste to yank from envelope
\nSaid stamp, as well as tear it.<\/p>\n

And thus she brought it to her dad
\nIn ecstasy to show him,
\nBut, from his look of seething rage,
\nShe found she didn\u2019t know him.<\/p>\n

A fortune he had won and lost
\nThrough his beloved daughter,
\nBecause to leave old stamp intact
\nHe ne\u2019er before had taught her.
\nAnd thou, O stamp-collecting sire,
\nTake this advice from me:
\nWhile in their youth, and ere too late,
\nTeach kids Philately.
\nG.M. McCracken, \u201cPoor Mary,\u201d 1933 ((G.M. McCracken, \u201cPoor Mary,\u201d Washington Post, August 27, 1933, sec. JP, 3.))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One might expect to find this jokingly didactic poem about the need to teach children about philately in a philatelic paper, yet this appeared in the Washington Post<\/em> in 1933. By the 1930s, literacy in stamp collecting grew far beyond groups of philatelists and individual collectors, as stamp collecting permeated public culture. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Americans slowly learned to see postage stamps as something other than purely a sticker that represented pre-payment for mailing a letter. In the poem above, Mary noticed the stamp on the \u201cRare Patriotic Cover,\u201d because she had been trained to identify it as something special and worth saving. Like Mary, Americans of all ages knew that people collected stamps for a variety of reasons. Starting in the late nineteenth century, American newspapers, magazines<\/a>, and eventually radio<\/a> exposed their audiences to articles, columns, and programs about stamp collecting, and circulated the idea collecting was educational for its participants. Philatelists shaped those discussions by publishing primers on how to start collecting, giving lectures, volunteering with after school groups, and by holding public exhibitions of their collections. Collectors first read imagery on stamps and created a set of practices around collecting and interpreting those objects.<\/p>\n

Those practices of reading that included learning convention of stamp designs and interpreting the imagery, were adopted and used by different groups. Stamps\u2019 accessibility in price and in visual appeal made them attractive pedagogical tools for teaching geography and empire, for encouraging religious evangelization, for encouraging orderly and structured play, and for engaging with the marketplace. These efforts to educate students and adults overlapped over a period of fifty years, as different generations of Americans learned about the practice and about meanings embedded in stamps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

O Mary found a little stamp, A rarity, conceded. In fact \u2019twas just the very one Her dear old daddy needed. It also chanced, this wondrous stamp, That Mary did discover a Rare Patriotic Cover. Now, Mary knowing that her dad Liked stamps found in a garret, Made haste to yank from envelope Said stamp, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-370","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stampingamericanmemory.org\/2014version\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}