In this episode, I chat with Cameron Blevins, a history professor at the University of Colorado Denver. Cameron recently wrote the fascinating and important book, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. I loved this book and was thrilled to have Cameron on the podcast to talk about the outsized but often overlooked role the US postal service played in the settling of the American West. We talk a lot about the history of rural post offices but we also talk about the Pony Express, the mythology of the American West, the role of government in rural America, how UPS and FedEx now rely on the rural postal network for last mile package delivery, and the return of the village post office idea in rural America. We end, as always, with the Road Trip Music Question - and I learn that Cameron asks a similar question to his students!
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Podcast music: “A Happy Day” by codemusic, http://www.jamendo.com, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/