Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West
Presenter: Cameron Blevins
In his book Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, historian Cameron Blevins argues that the US Post wove together two of the nineteenth century’s defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. Using traditional archival research and analyzing a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, Blevins reveals a new picture of the federal government in the American West.
Cameron Blevins is an Associate Professor, Clinical Teaching Track in the History Department at the University of Colorado Denver, where he teaches courses in US History and digital humanities. Cameron's historical research focuses on the nineteenth-century U.S., the western United States, and the American state. A leader in the field of spatial history and digital history, he explores the application of computational methods such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), data visualization, and text mining to the process of researching and teaching history.