The National Postal Museum sponsors three biennial prizes for recent scholarship on the history of the postal system in the United States and its territories, and their antecedents. The US Postal Service started these awards in 2007 to honor its first historian, Rita Lloyd Moroney. These prizes – now, the National Postal Museum Awards for Scholarship in Postal History – are designed to recognize scholarship on the history of the American postal system and to raise awareness of the significance of the postal system in American life. Scholarship by graduate students is eligible for a $1,000 award; work by scholars and professionals (faculty members, independent scholars, and public historians) is eligible for a $2,000 award; and public history scholarship presented online is eligible for a $1,000 award.
The museum is pleased to announce that the winners in 2020 are:
Professional prize:
David Johnson. Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
Graduate student prizes:
L. Bao Bui. “'I Feel Impelled To Write': Male Intimacy, Epistolary Privacy, and the Culture of Letter Writing during the American Civil War.” PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2016.
Alicia Maggard. "One Nation, under Steam: Technopolitics, Steam Navigation, and the Rise of American Industrial Power." PhD diss., Brown University, 2019.
Dr. David Johnson is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Florida. Dr. Bao Bui teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Dr. Alicia Maggard teaches at Williams-Mystic, the Ocean and Coastal Studies Semester of Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum.
“It is remarkable in how many ways mail delivery has shaped the United States,” noted Dr. Susan Smith, the Winton M. Blount Research Chair at the museum and the chair of the award review committee. “I learned so much from these works. The winners address such wide-ranging topics as the influence of the Post Office as a contracting authority in the development of transportation routes and the binding of the new American states in the West to the more established states in the East; as a public service whose availability and promise of privacy encouraged improved literacy and intimacy shaping familial correspondence during the Civil War; and as a key component of a market economy filling public demand, while simultaneously serving as a law enforcement agency policing the morality of the mail. Indeed, gay consumer culture and understandings of community developed as they did through entrepreneurs' use of, and struggles with, the postal service.”
The National Postal Museum congratulates the three winners and thanks all those who submitted material. Their diverse work advances postal history scholarship in new directions and exciting ways that demonstrate the centrality of the postal service and the mail it carries to American history.
The museum will begin accepting submissions for the next Awards for Scholarship in Postal History on December 3, 2021.
