The National Postal Museum sponsors 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 2024 are:
Professional prize:
Justin Gage. “We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance.” Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.
In “We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance,” Dr. Justin Gage demonstrates how Native individuals and groups harnessed the expanding colonial infrastructure – particularly the off-reservation boarding schools’ English-language literacy requirements and the resulting rise of a shared language, the exchange of letters and information through the postal service, and the mobility provided by the railroads – to assert their needs, develop their relationships and defend their cultures. Gage undertook essential archival work, locating letters written by and for Natives and combing through extensive governmental materials. This deep dive into the primary sources allows him to untangle what he refers to as the ‘networks of correspondence’ and the ‘networks of visitation,’ particularly in the late 1870s and 1880s, that allowed for the rapid spread between and amongst Native communities of the Ghost Dance —a religious movement led by a charismatic leader whom some believed to be the Messiah and who maintained that Natives would return to a period before the arrival of the white man. The dance itself, with the large number of participants traveling from disparate communities to both investigate the rumors and to participate, and the perceived threats to the government’s civilizing mission unnerved the US government and many of its agents, resulting in greater attempts to gather and control the flow of information, such as through the surveillance and censorship of Native mail and the continued monitoring of Native mobility. “We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us” thus offers an important corrective to common narratives about the agency of Native communities and a fascinating expansion of our understandings of the crucial position and role of the postal system in American history.
Dr. Justin Gage is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas.
Graduate student prize:
Stephen P. Hay. “Distance and Difference: Seamen and Maritime Communication in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the Atlantic World, 1730-1800.” PhD diss., The University of British Columbia, 2020.
“Distance and Difference: Seamen and Maritime Communication in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the Atlantic World, 1730-1800” tackles the understudied questions of whom working at sea communicated what to whom and why. In this dissertation, Dr. Stephen Hay traces how seaman from varying social and cultural strata in the colonies transmitted ideas and information through the written, spoken and sung word. With access to reports from the colonies and Great Britian, and from other mariners with whom they crossed paths, seaman did not rely on colonial printers for their information and were particularly well informed about war and commerce. They, in turn, shared information and rumors with people on shore upon arrival, and printers relied on the documents the mariners carried and their interactions, most particularly with shipmasters representing the interests of the merchants, in reporting the news. Further qualifying the historiographic emphasis on the leading role of printers and the postal system, which the printers sometimes officially served as postmasters, much of this news had already spread by word of mouth or by the privately conveyed letters that shipmasters failed to deposit with postmasters. Moreover, Hay finds that the intersections of maritime communication networks and official, if frequently haphazard, postal communications, particularly the 1765 Postage Act, contributed to colonial resistance to British rule to a degree unrecognized in the literature. Importantly, this occurred in a period when seamen from the colonies increasingly worried about impressment into the British Navy and were developing social attitudes distinct from those expressed in the British songs and verses to which they were regularly exposed. Mariners and maritime communications informed public opinion and, as Hay suggests, did so more than historians have yet appreciated.
Dr. Hay completed his doctorate in history at the University of British Columbia in 2020. He is a policy advisor at Library and Archives Canada│Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.
The National Postal Museum congratulates Dr. Gage and Dr. Hay and thanks all those who submitted material. Their diverse work advances postal history scholarship in new and exciting directions that demonstrate the centrality to American history of the postal service and the mail it carries.
