NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM

Smithsonian Institution, P. O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012

Allen Kane, Director

In the summer of 1993, the National Postal Museum opened in the historic City Post Office Building, located next to Union Station. The Museum was created with the cooperation of the United States Postal Service and houses over 5.9 million objects, making this the largest collection of its kind.

The systematized movement of written communication is thousands of years old. The message and the medium are intrinsically connected to our need for interpersonal communication and the national necessity to mark territorial boundaries. Mail provides citizens and their government with mutual access. Postal monies have provided the capital that encouraged transportation routes and road maintenance. Mail boosts morale in the military and makes the goods of the world accessible to all. It transports the national culture, promotes capitalism, migration, community and identity formation, and provided a communication link encouraging the formation of like citizenry long before the existence of the World Wide Web. Mail contracts supplied financial fodder for transportation growth and demonstrated the usefulness of mail as a medium of connection, be it for individuals, businesses or government.

America’s postal history can be defined through the use of objects as small as stamps and as mammoth as the nation’s first Highway Post Office bus. It is expressed in heartrending letters from soldiers on foreign battlefields and through the explosion of direct mail marketing. America’s postal history is the story of the people who made the service work and those who use it.

RESEARCH STAFF

GANZ, Cheryl R., Curator of Philately. B.A.E. (1972) School of the Art Institute of Chicago; M.A. (1995) Roosevelt University; Ph.D. (2005) University of Illinois, Chicago. Research specialties: Stamps and general philately; air mail; zeppelin mail; social and cultural history; world's fairs.

HEIDELBAUGH, Lynn R., Assistant Curator of Postal History. B.A. (1996) Bryn Mawr College; M.A. (2001) George Washington University. Research specialties: U.S. postal history; tourism and tourist industry history.

MARSH, Allison C., Assistant Curator of Postal History. B.A. (1998) Swarthmore College; PhD (candidate 2007) Johns Hopkins University. Research specialties: history of science and technology; transportation history; business history; tourism studies; U.S. postal history.

POPE, Nancy A., Historian and Curator of Postal History. B.A. (1979), M.A. (1985) George Washington University. Research specialties: U.S. postal history; labor history and technology; delivery and transportation history; westward expansion; pony express; rural delivery and letter writing.

Introduction

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