Cameron Blevins has crafted a shining masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship with Paper Trails: The U.S. Post and the Making of the American West. Blevins contributes a broad reassessment of the state’s role, structure, and reach by leveraging traditional archival research and innovative geospatial digital history methods to study the rapid proliferation of postal services in the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century AmericanWest. However, Blevins’s brilliance lies in his expert balance of broad, sweeping analysis and detailed social history. Paper Trails is not just a story about data and state functions but also a chronicle about ordinary people whose lives were impacted by accessibility to the largest-scale postal service in the world. Blevins illustrates how the U.S. Postal Service facilitated the flow of personal messages, commerce, news, andmoney through the vast expanses of the western United States while also aiding the destructive colonization of Native American lands as the “underlying spatial circuitry of westward expansion” (3). Blevins successfully argues that the triumph of an accessible federal postal service in a rapidly expanding American frontier was not due to a rigidly centralized bureaucracy but rather the postal system’s decentralized flexibility. Blevins argues that postal decentralization, characterized by an agency model of public-private partnerships, local agents, and contractors, enabled the rapid development of postal services essential to the nation’s periphery through outsourced employees, transportation, and postal facilities. Throughout Paper Trails, Blevins effectually examines overarching historical themes surrounding the unique nature of the American postal system and the functions of the agencymodel of administration to effectively bolster his argument for the importance of a dynamic “Gossamer Network” postal system defined by intersectionality that blurred public and private spheres (1). Blevins structures his chapters thematically. He employs maps, charts, and captivatingly written narratives to illustrate his data, examine broad

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邮政服务外包：通过地理空间数字历史重新概念化国家 - Cameron Blevins。纸迹：美国邮政和美国西部的形成。纽约：牛津大学出版社，2021 年。x + 232 页。34.95 美元（精装本），ISBN 978-0-19-005367-3。

Cameron Blevins 通过 Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West 创作了一部闪耀的跨学科学术杰作。Blevins 通过利用传统的档案研究和创新的地理空间数字历史方法来研究 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初美国西部邮政服务的快速发展，从而对国家的作用、结构和范围进行了广泛的重新评估。然而，布莱文斯的才华在于他在广泛、全面的分析和详细的社会历史之间的专家平衡。Paper Trails 不仅是一个关于数据和状态功能的故事，也是一个关于普通人的编年史，他们的生活受到世界上最大规模邮政服务的影响。Blevins 展示了美国邮政服务如何促进个人信息、商业、新闻和金钱通过美国西部广阔的土地，同时也帮助美洲原住民土地的破坏性殖民作为“向西扩张的潜在空间回路”（3）。Blevins 成功地辩称，在迅速扩张的美国边境地区，可访问的联邦邮政服务的胜利不是由于严格集中的官僚机构，而是邮政系统分散的灵活性。Blevins 认为，以公私合作、当地代理和承包商的代理模式为特征的邮政分权，通过外包员工、运输和邮政设施，促进了对国家周边地区必不可少的邮政服务的快速发展。在整个纸迹中，Blevins 有效地审视了围绕美国邮政系统的独特性质和行政机构模式的功能的总体历史主题，以有效地支持他关于动态“游丝网络”邮政系统的重要性的论点，该系统由模糊公共和私人领域的交叉性定义（ 1）。Blevins 按主题组织他的章节。他使用地图、图表和引人入胜的文字叙述来说明他的数据，检查广泛的