In 1900, news of U.S. postal officials committing fraud in Cuba became a scandal that influenced the political, legal, and governmental trajectory of U.S. imperialism. Anti-imperialist Democrats used the frauds to undermine Republican pro-imperialists on the eve of the 1900 election. Prominent Republicans hoped to contain the scandal through swift punishment, but when the accused refused extradition, the resulting Supreme Court case, though rarely discussed, became the first of the Insular Cases. In 1900, it was not yet clear whether the U.S. empire would be run by self-interested actors or self-proclaimed progressive reformers. The commitment to progressive imperialism observed later in other colonies was, at least in part, worked out in this postal frauds case, as individuals chose how to respond to the scandal. Their actions were guided as much by scandal and the pursuit of self-interest as they were by lofty ideals about good government.

On February 2, 2023, Ilhan Omar took to the floor of the House of Representatives to address what being an American meant to her. Responding to Republican efforts to remove her from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the representative for Minnesota's fifth congressional district asked, “Who gets to be an American? What opinions do you have to have to be counted as American?”1 In attacking Omar for her past comments on Israel and track record of criticizing U.S. foreign policy, House Republicans were conflating progressive politics with foreignness, arguing that this combination is subversive and represents a real threat to the American government and the stability of the nation.2 Indeed, the vote to remove Omar came just a few years after President Donald J. Trump had implored Omar and her progressive allies in “The Squad”—House Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib—to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”3 Acknowledging how her race and identity were once again being used by Republicans to question her Americanness and delegitimize her politics, Omar offered the following rebuttal:

In this Photoarticle, we survey what we will call the post-historical U.S. postage stamps of the last third of the twentieth century. We focus on stamps depicting the space race and space travel, as well as the linkage of some of those stamps to the 1992 Olympic games, to analyze the iconographic and narrative consequences of an increasing turn toward the commercialization of postal services. The stamps we consider coincide with a series of new commercial strategies on the part of the United States Postal Service (USPS) and a broad resurgence in public interest in space travel. While many critics during the 1960s considered the space race to be a distraction from more pressing political concerns—such as urban poverty or the war in Vietnam—by the 1980s and 1990s, space travel had become a less controversial endeavor (perhaps due to its large-scale defunding), and astronauts, especially the Apollo 11 astronauts, were widely lauded as heroes. We have chosen this “topical” focus (as stamp collectors say) for two reasons. First, the iconography of space exploration is dominated by one specific moment, when the lunar module Eagle touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969. Despite an ongoing history of space exploration before and after 1969, the moon landing, we will argue, was treated in postal iconography as a timeless event —a climactic technological triumph that seemed to announce what Francis Fukuyama, in an influential essay, called “the end of history.”