“Do you think that whenever I'm talking to someone I'm conscious of whether or not he is ‘white’ or ‘colored’? … I was born a ‘native,’ and I've lived with racial discrimination. But we are free now. I'm no longer a ‘native’ but an Indonesian…. I don't feel inferior to whites, and I don't hate them either,” Sitor Situmorang, a preeminent Indonesian poet and essayist, told African American writer Richard Wright at an April 1955 social gathering in Wright's honor. Growing more agitated, Situmorang raised his voice and continued, “We are against colonialism, but we are not against whites. We struggled for racial equality, not for the belief in another superrace, a colored superrace.”

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.”

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:

This essay explores the internationalist vision of Wendell Willkie during World War II, especially as illustrated in his 1943 bestseller, One World. Willkie proposed three mid-century popular geographies of the globe—ways of seeing the relationship between the United States and the world in the context of the expanding ambit of American power and influence. Willkie offered a universal view of the planet, one that envisioned a new kind of global space free of borders; a depiction of imperial power contested, which critiqued the racial thinking that underpinned conquest abroad and discrimination at home; and a view of imperial power obscured, which left unmapped the actual contours of already existing American empire, a dilemma revealed by the omission of the Puerto Rico stop on his 1942 world tour from One World. Willkie's widely debated vision revealed the conflicted state of American opinion about U.S. empire during the war.

It is hard to review African American history without confronting the multiple meanings of debt. There was debt owed, debt paid, debt inherited, and debt hidden in the social tax associated with a subordinate status in the United States. All of these meanings are embedded in the murder of Elmore Bolling. Called Buddy by his relatives, Bolling defied probability by building a highly successful business in Lowndesboro, Alabama, in the 1930s and 1940s. He used debt in a conventional sense, to lease a plantation. Yet his entrepreneurial skills allowed him to offset that debt and amass wealth. He grew corn, cotton, and sugar cane. More impressively, he owned a general store, a gas station, a fleet of trucks, and a catering business, which enabled him to employ at least forty other Black residents. His business acumen allowed him to maintain $40,000 in the bank and another $5,000 in other assets, a remarkable sum for a Black man in the American South during the Jim Crow era.

Three Black women pose for a photograph mid play, a golf course stretching out behind them. With slight smiles, they squint in the sun at the camera, taking a break from the meditative intensity of the game. Two women wear skirts, or maybe one is sporting a culotte, bobby socks, and at least one of them seems to be wearing a regulation cleated shoe. A breeze blows fabric against legs. Each holds her club atop a golf ball, their bodies and the flagstick casting shadows on the putting green (see Figure 1). They are members of the Par-Links Black Women's Golf Club, formed in California's East Bay in 1958. Advertising for new members in the Oakland Black newspaper, the California Voice, the club held its first tournament the following year at Tilden Park Golf Course in Berkeley. “… challenge or be challenged,” the group cheered: “Your place on the ladder depends on your win.”