ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Twenty-seven years ago, the U.S. Postal Service opened a new post office building in Mesquite, Nevada, a city of just under 21,000 some 90 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Apart from a plaque at the entrance denoting its construction in 1994, the facility isn’t much different from thousands of others in the United States today.
This wasn’t always the case, as historian Cameron Blevins points out in “Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West.” From the mid-1800s to well past the turn of the century, postal operations were highly political, semi-privatized, and provided what the author calls a “gossamer network” of outlets uniting a diverse and sometimes unstable frontier.
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