Workers survey the 30-foot sculpture ghandiG by Peter Shelton ’73 at the museum’s former location before moving it by crane across College Avenue to its new home.

Drivers who regularly ventured past the Pomona College campus in the early mornings of October and November 2019 likely witnessed a strange ritual at the intersection of Bonita and College avenues.

Day after day, a procession of student interns crossed the street, slowly rolling stainless-steel restaurant-style carts loaded with slate-gray boxes tied down with brightly colored bungees. Motorists waited as the parade carefully bypassed the myriad yellow warning bumps near the curbs. Reaching the other side, the interns gently maneuvered the carts up to the sidewalk and then onto the ramp of the newly completed Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College.

The museum collection was arriving at its new home. Finally.

For many people, the words “Moving Day” trigger fear and apprehension from beginning to end: the monumental chaos of sorting and packing items, the crucial task of hiring a trustworthy moving team and the suspense mixed with dread of opening boxes at the new location, hoping for minimal damage. But for the staff at the Benton, “Moving Day” was a welcomed phrase for a transition that was long overdue and took nearly two years to complete.

Intern Emily Petro ’21 sorts and labels arrowheads from the Native American Collection.

When news of the 2017 groundbreaking for the spacious new $44 million state-of-the-art museum at the southwest corner of Bonita and College was announced, there was a cheer of relief that all objects in the museum collection would be under one roof at last. For more than 10 years, as many as 13,000 objects in the growing collection had been spread out in three satellite venues: Montgomery Art Gallery, Rembrandt Hall and Bridges Auditorium. The Native American Collection, first assembled around the turn of the 20th century, occupied various locations—among them the basement of the humanities building at Scripps College, then Sumner Hall, and in 2011 the lower level of Bridges.

Celebration quickly dissolved into the electric hum of brainpower as staff began to strategize. Here was a chance to do an up-to-date inventory of every collection item before safely packing and transporting objects as diverse as Andy Warhol Polaroids, Goya etchings, alabaster bas-relief sculptures, large abstract paintings, beaded Sioux leggings and contemporary art by Pomona alumni, including Helen Pashgian ’56 and Chris Burden ’69.

Such an inventory had never been done before.

Workmen prepare to move ghandiG by Peter Shelton

“I had been warned by colleagues that moving a collection is the single most difficult and yet rewarding task a registrar could ever undertake,” says Steve Comba, associate director/registrar at the Benton—who already had twice overseen moves of the Native American Collection.

Objects didn’t have to travel physically far—all satellite locations were blocks or buildings away—but that didn’t make the task less daunting. Handling objects at any step of the process is always a risk, says Comba. “There’s always the possibility of human error. We wanted to do this right. We had to take our time.”

Comba brought on board independent collections manager Karen Hudson, who assumed duties as move coordinator/registrar. “Before you move anything, you need to know what you have,” she says about the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of creating the inventory. “You start by opening up every box, in every storage room and in every building. I had my eye on every single object in the collection.”

Going through hanging racks, cabinetry and Solander storage boxes one by one for almost a year, Hudson compared each item to its own unique catalog number, cross-checked the database and updated all pertinent information. She noted items with missing numbers, objects that had been numbered incorrectly and other discrepancies.

“You don’t want to move problems,” sums up Hudson. “You solve them first before you pack them up.”

As with any move, surprises were uncovered. For years Comba thought that a rare Sioux ceremonial rattle had been lost; he was thrilled when the beautifully quillworked and beaded treasure was discovered during the inventory. Another surprise: The museum’s collection grew from 11,000 objects pre-inventory to nearly 13,000 in late 2018. (Note: Because of additional gifts to the collection since 2018, that number is now officially 16,000.)

The first museum piece arrived at its new home in spring of 2019.

In the early morning of March 22, spectators watched a 30-foot-tall bronze sculpture dangle from a hoist and crane that was inching its way down College Avenue. No trees or overhead wires blocked the transit. Under a blue sky, there was just a steady progression forward: ghandiG was on the move.

Purchased by the college in 2006, the ethereal sculpture by Pomona alumnus Peter Shelton ’73 was making its way to a new home amid the landscape of the Benton, which was still a work in progress at the time.

Moving ghandiG involved crews severing the sculpture’s support cabling system at the old location, transporting the artwork two blocks and then installing it—with new cabling—at the prominent corner. Shelton was consulted about the proper orientation for his sculpture, which now welcomes visitors to the museum in a striking way.

While ghandiG was officially the first piece of art to be moved to the Benton, it would be months before the rest of the collection joined the sculpture at the new location. Transporting those other items was far less dramatic—but there were still some heart-pounding moments.

The process involved the meticulous packing of hundreds of paintings, pottery works, photos and more. Comba, Hudson and a third member of the museum staff were joined by a team of interns Hudson described as invaluable. “We needed their help, their youthful stamina and enthusiasm,” she says. Comba goes further, calling them “rock stars.” He adds that the collection-moving interns weren’t all art history majors. “We had conservation majors from Scripps College and athletes from Pomona,” he says. “They each brought their own skills to the project.”

The museum could have hired an expensive professional art-moving company for the entire job, but since the Benton is a teaching museum with a robust internship program, the collection move presented an exceptional chance for hands-on, behind-the-scenes, roll-up-your-sleeves learning. Twelve interns—among them Pomona students Nina Mueller ’19, Ethan Dieck ’22, Jem Stern ’22, Quin Fraley ’22, Katherine Purev ’23 and Emily Petro ’21—stepped up for a challenge that lasted from April 2019 to March 2020.

The Native American collection was the first to be physically moved; it was the farthest from the new museum (although still only a few blocks away) and had many delicate objects. Comba also wanted to restart that collection’s educational outreach program for third graders, which had been suspended because of the move, as soon as possible. Interns assisted the staff with packing, wrapping and sealing boxes in the basement of Bridges; later the team hand-carried them up by elevator and then carefully loaded and unloaded them in and out of the museum van. Moving the Native American collection took about three months—and countless van rides—to complete.

Hudson made sure that interns knew the protocols of proper object handling, dispelling the myth that the only way to touch museum items is with white cotton gloves. “The cotton fibers of a white glove can snag loose ends of baskets. If you are handling anything fibrous, it could be a disaster,” she says. Nitrile gloves are typically used to handle photographs and prints (they leave no fingerprints), but experts don’t wear them when picking up smooth objects like vases (too slick). Overall, the growing professional consensus is that clean bare hands provide a better and more secure grip, especially when picking up organic items made of stone or bone, such as arrowheads.

Fraley, one of the interns, used her bare hands to check and pack 450 Chinese snuff bottles from the Qing Dynasty, one of her many special assignments. A history major, Fraley recalls getting into a rhythm as she handled the ornate bottles, which ranged in size from 2 to 4 inches. Using poly foam batting, Fraley gently wrapped and nestled the bottles into their drawer-like cubbies encased in pre-cut Ethafoam, a brand of foam often used for artifact storage. As she worked, Fraley examined the intricate details of these ancient mini works of art. “The artist used a fine paintbrush and painted the insides of the bottles,” she says. “It was so special to be able to handle and observe these up close.”

Some heavy or incredibly fragile items, such as Italian Renaissance panel paintings from the Kress Collection, were handled by professional fine art movers.

Comba lost track of how much poly foam was used to securely wrap objects. “It was everywhere,” he says of the material that is firm enough to cushion delicate objects but soft enough not to put unwanted pressure on certain structural elements, like the spout of a teakettle. “You want everything to have a soft landing at every step of the way,” he says.

Items were transported three ways. Heavy and incredibly fragile pieces—like the Kress Collection’s Italian Renaissance panel paintings, a 19th-century marble bust and a Sam Maloof walnut music stand—were given to a professional art-moving company that spent only two days on campus. Most objects, however, were moved using campus vans. Lightweight ones—such as photos, prints, scrolls and manuscripts—were walked over in rolling restaurant-style carts. “It was a huge responsibility, and it was nerve-racking,” Fraley says of those early-morning expeditions. “We just took our time, but I’ll tell you, that short walk never felt so long.”

Days after the last objects were moved to the Benton on March 3, 2020, the pandemic hit. Interns were sent home, which left staffers the final task of checking in and storing those remaining items in their new homes. “We didn’t have a time pressure to finish the job,” admits Comba. “You could call that a pandemic benefit.”

As far as Comba has seen, no item sustained any damage from the moving process, marking this move a huge success.

Now, months after the entire collection has officially settled into its new digs, the reverberations from the relocation still echo for those on the moving team, especially Fraley. “This really opened my eyes to the depth of the moving process and the specialness of this collection,” she says. “Because of this experience, I will never look at any museum the same way ever again.”

The long-awaited Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College opened to the public in May 2021 with reservation-based visits after the planned 2020 opening was delayed by the pandemic.

Named in recognition of a $15 million gift from Janet Inskeep Benton ’79, a longtime supporter of the arts and a member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees, the 33,000-square-foot museum provides not only space for the public enjoyment of art but also serves as a teaching museum and a new gathering spot on campus.

The public community celebration planned for November 13 will be preceded by an opening reception and artist talk with Sadie Barnette on November 6 as part of Sadie Barnette: Legacy & Legend. On November 11, the Benton will feature guest curator Karen Kice and graphic designer Amir Berbić as part of Sahara: Acts of Memory. Throughout the fall, the $44 million facility designed by Machado Silvetti Associates and Gensler will host events for the campus community in the museum’s courtyard and striking glass-walled interior spaces.

As an inquisitive girl growing up in the city of Pomona, Genevieve Carpio ’05 learned about her world while riding around town with her family. The adults in her life were happy to converse with their captive passenger, especially one so unusually attentive for her age.

With her grandfather behind the wheel of his Chevy pickup, the girl soaked up tales of Carpio family history as poor migrant farmworkers who fled the Mexican Revolution and soon settled in Pomona’s historic barrio. And while cruising Claremont with her mother in the family car, she got a glimpse of her academic future.

The college town was close to the North Pomona home of the Carpios, one of the first Latino families to buy property in a formerly red-lined neighborhood, once reserved by contract for whites. Their abode was now Claremont-adjacent, just a short drive north on Indian Hill Boulevard, which seemed like an artery to another life.

“For fun, my mom enjoyed driving around Claremont and looking at the houses and we would say, ‘Which house do you want to live in? Oh, I want to live in that house. No, I want to live in that house.’ And then she would take us around the colleges, just to look at them.”

But Grace Carpio, a stay-at-home mom who hails from Puerto Rico, was not just sightseeing. She was planting a seed. “That’s where you’re going to go to college when you grow up,” she would say with certainty.

“No, I’m not,” young Carpio would snap back. “I’m going far away.”

Time proved her mother right. And time also taught Carpio an important lesson about the meaning of success and the value of uncovering untold histories in her own backyard.

“For me, having grown up in a very working-class community, success always meant getting as far away as possible,” says Carpio, who did research in Brazil and Argentina as an undergraduate. “In anthropology, it seemed to me there was this idea that you go to these places very far away to study something new and translate it according to these anthropological frameworks. But it was really being in Brazil where I noticed that, as a person who wasn’t Brazilian, there was a lot I had left to learn about interpreting these cultures.”

During her South American stay, coincidentally, Carpio was reading a book exploring the history of race and labor in the citrus industry of Southern California written by historian Matt Garcia, who holds a doctorate from what is now Claremont Graduate University.

From her vantage point in the Southern Hemisphere, Carpio experienced a paradigm shift that would send her career in a new direction.

“It opened this window into being able to do work in the communities that you come from,” says Carpio, now an associate professor in UCLA’s César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. “It showed me it was possible to be able to write about home in a way I had never considered before.”

Genevieve Carpio ’05, husband Eric Gonzalez and son Elliot. Their daughter was born in September.

The past summer was an eventful one for Carpio and her family—husband Eric Gonzalez and their rambunctious 3-year-old boy Elliot. They moved into a new faculty apartment on the UCLA campus, making room for the arrival of their second child, Amelia, born on Labor Day.

If her schedule was harried, Carpio didn’t show it when she met for an interview in a shaded picnic area outside her office. At 38, she looks young enough to pass for one of her own graduate students. She’s relaxed and down-to-earth, yet also dignified. Despite sitting on a hard bench for an hour, Carpio barely shifts position, reflecting an inner discipline that was apparent to her parents from childhood.

Her rise through academia has been steady and strategically planned. She went straight up the academic ladder: B.A. in anthropology from Pomona (2005), M.A. in urban planning from UCLA (2007), doctorate in American studies and ethnicity from USC (2013), and finally a postdoctoral fellowship in ethnicity, race and migration at Yale (2015).

And on July 1, she earned tenure at UCLA, a status that brings professional privilege and private relief. She had dreaded the instability of the untenured, with the prospect of losing her job and being forced back on the “super mobile” college job market that could have landed her anywhere in the country.

Carpio is certain that her tenure bid was boosted by the publication of her well-written and well-received book—Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019).

Thus, ironically, her work on mobility helped ensure that she could stay put.

“I feel like I’m at this really exciting crossroads,” she says, using a term for intersection that figures prominently in her life and work.

UCLA courses taught by Prof. Genevieve Carpio include Race and the Digital Divide and Barrio Suburbanism.

In the book, Carpio’s first, she examines the history of the Inland Empire through the lens of mobility—the freedom of movement, granted or denied to various racial groups. She focuses on specific policies used to control not just mass immigration, but also the “everyday mobilities” of marginalized, non-white populations.

Those policies included bicycle ordinances enforced disproportionately against Japanese workers; laws against joyriding that sent many Mexican youth to reform schools; the forced confinement of Native Americans at federal Indian boarding schools; and laundry laws aimed at driving single Chinese men out of downtown Riverside by banning them from washing their clothing outdoors.

Carpio’s book is part of the publisher’s American Crossroads series launched some 25 years ago, and it perfectly meets the original mission, says series co-founder George Sanchez, a USC professor of American studies, ethnicity and history, who served as Carpio’s doctoral dissertation advisor.

“We were going to go after books that made a difference in the field, that we thought were breaking new ground,” Sanchez explained during a presentation at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Resource Center shortly after the book’s publication. “Gena’s book fits this beautifully. … She shows things that were invisible to other scholars.”

Invisible, yes, but partly because other scholars weren’t looking. The Inland Empire is quasi-virgin territory for serious academic investigation, Carpio says. The academic neglect has the effect of silencing the voices of migrant workers and communities of color, overlooking the very people who helped build the citrus industry for which the Inland Empire is historically renowned. And by default, it allows this historical vacuum to be filled by the self-promoting origin myth of white settlers who colonized the area in the late 1800s—as if history began with them.

Riverside’s Washington Restaurant, established in 1910 and named for the first U.S. president, was operated by the Harada family, Japanese Americans who were later forcibly relocated during World War II. (Courtesy of the Museum of Riverside, Riverside, California and the Harada Family Archival Collection)

Carpio’s research began more than 10 years ago as part of her doctoral dissertation. At the time, it wasn’t history that drew her attention to modern conflicts over mobility. It was current affairs.

In the early 1990s, San Bernardino authorities had banned lowriders from a city festival celebrating the fabled Route 66, even though Chicano car culture had flourished on the thoroughfare which traversed the city’s historic Mt. Vernon barrio.

“It was so wrong,” Carpio says. “I really wanted to understand what it meant, and why it bothered me so much.”

She was also incensed by the proliferation of sobriety checkpoints in heavily Latino neighborhoods. In the guise of public safety, the checkpoints worked as immigration traps for undocumented drivers, caught on their way to work or to drop their kids at soccer practice. This “hyper-policing” turned the streets into “minefields,” she says, and infused fear into everyday trips.

Carpio’s outrage led her to join protests organized in 2008 by the Pomona Habla Coalition. She and fellow demonstrators would stand at street corners with signs warning motorists of checkpoints ahead.

Such restrictions on mobility, she realized, “send powerful messages about who belongs and who doesn’t belong.”

Carpio showed an early commitment “to fostering authentic, non-hierarchical relationships between college and community,” says Pomona Prof. Gilda Ochoa, the advisor on Carpio’s senior thesis, White Hoods and Welcome Baskets: The Forming of a Mexican Barrio in Pomona 1920-1940. “Before there was the Draper Center (for Community Partnerships), Genevieve and I were on campus task forces together working to enhance community partnerships,” says Ochoa, a professor of Chicana/o-Latina/o studies. “I was lucky to learn from her. A few years after she graduated, she even recruited me to join her on the Historical Society of Pomona Valley.”

Carpio spent a decade of dogged digging through the dusty, musty files of such historical societies and other public history sources. She rummaged through library basements, scoured forgotten public records, explored local museums and perused private family photo collections. Moreover, she sought out those quirky, unheralded folks who make local history their life’s mission.

She refers to that disparate pool of primary sources as “the rebel archives,” a term coined by historian Kelly Lytle-Hernández, the bedrock for constructing a “subversive history” of the Inland Empire. She proudly points out the hefty 70-page notes section at the back of the book, where she documents the oft-neglected archival sources she unearthed.

“I wanted to create a bit of a trail so that those who were coming after me would have this place to start, would have this map of the various resources in the region.”

Vincent Carpio Sr. was a field laborer before joining the U.S. military. He urged his granddaughter to pursue an education.

Carpio likes to say she was raised in the borderlands, the area where eastern Los Angeles County, specifically Pomona and Claremont, meets the counties of San Bernardino and Riverside. From there, the path to success led due west to the big city, at least for ambitious students like her. Nobody thought of looking east to the vast open spaces of the Inland Empire, which she considered an intellectual wasteland at the time.

Two uncles on Carpio’s mother’s side, Osvaldo and Nonato Garcia, also served their country.

Once again, it took distance for her to grasp the importance of her own backyard as a fertile territory for academic study. During her postdoc at Yale, Carpio spent two years writing and thinking about issues back home. So there she was, ensconced behind Ivy League walls almost 3,000 miles away, in a program that required “direct engagement with the cultures, structures, and peoples” that were the subject of her studies.

And it dawned on her that this history was her story.

“It’s the story of my family.”

Genevieve Tañia Carpio is a fourth-generation American, a great-granddaughter of Mexican immigrants Frank and Margaret Carpio from San Francisco del Rincón, Guanajuato, who came to this country in 1916 at the height of the Mexican Revolution. Four years after their arrival, they welcomed their first U.S.-born son, Vincent Victor Carpio—Genevieve’s grandfather.

Little Vincent’s mother, who had married at 16, could not read or write, according to the 1930 census, which also identified his father as a “picker” working in the “citrus fruit” industry. By then, the family—including 10-year-old Vincent’s four adult siblings—lived on West 12^th Street in the heart of the old Pomona barrio. During the ensuing Depression, the Carpio family would head north in their horse-drawn covered wagon to work the fertile fields around Fresno.

Vincent grew up in his father’s footsteps, dropping out after sixth grade to follow the migrant trail. His aborted schooling would later motivate him to stress the value of education for his son, Vincent Victor Carpio Jr., and his granddaughter, known as Gena, the girl who would listen to his family stories in the car.

Interestingly, official records underscore the theory that race is malleable: Vincent Sr. was identified as Mexican in the 1930 census, but 13 years later the U.S. Army drafted him as white. During his 17 months of service, Pvt. Carpio saw action on D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge. He was seriously injured by an artillery blast, spent five months in a military hospital and was sent home with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for bravery.

Back in Pomona, the veteran struggled to find work. He repeatedly tried to get a job with the city’s public works crew and was finally hired one day, only to find the job was “no longer available” when he reported in person. His name must have sounded Italian on the phone, his family reckons, but his appearance was unmistakably indigenously Mexican. Undeterred, the Carpio patriarch pushed his way onto the payroll, promising to work a week for free to prove himself. He wound up working for the City of Pomona for more than 20 years.

Carpio’s grandfather died on his 92^nd birthday in 2012, living long enough to see his granddaughter fulfill the hopes for an education that had eluded him. She had been named Genevieve after one of his daughters who died as an infant during the war, while he was away at boot camp. For her senior thesis at Pomona in 2005, Carpio interviewed her grandfather, then in his 80s, for one of many oral histories that eventually helped shape her book.

“We really valued oral history because it reveals stories that aren’t in official documents,” she says. “They aren’t the dominant stories about powerful people, the mayors or the business owners, but about the folks who built the city. Nobody knows who digs up the streets, who paves the streets. But that’s what my grandpa did, you know, he dug up the streets in Pomona.”

Her father, Vincent Jr., a long-time Chicano community activist, also cultivated a love of culture and history in his daughter as a young teen, urging her to volunteer at the Ygnacio Palomares Adobe, a Pomona museum.

Although Carpio graduated from high school 20 years ago this past summer, her mother still gushes with pride that Gena was accepted to all 12 colleges where she had applied. Carpio almost passed on applying to Pomona because she thought it would be too hard to get in, and “I was just so scared of rejection.” She still becomes emotional thinking of the day her admission letter from Pomona arrived in the mail.

“I opened it up and my knees buckled. I fell to the floor, and I just started sobbing. I was so happy.”

Four years later on her graduation day, Carpio joined her classmates in the traditional passage through the college gates with the weighty inscription: They only are loyal to this college who departing bear their added riches in trust for mankind.

“The idea is that education is not just for your own enrichment, but for you to do something good with what you’ve learned,” she says.

‘“I hope this book encourages people to write their stories, especially those that so often have been left off the map.”

“I feel like I’m at this really exciting crossroads.”
–Genevieve Carpio ’05

Cameron Blevins ’08 photographed by Flor Blake

On an 80-degree September day in 2016, Cameron Blevins ’08 was wearing a sweater as he waited in one of his favorite places in the world.

The windowless Ahmanson Reading Room of the Munger Research Center at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, is a carpeted kingdom of quiet. It is kept chilly to safeguard the more than 450,000 rare books and 8 million manuscript items the library holds.

Blevins, now a professor of U.S. history and digital humanities at the University of Colorado Denver, handed an archivist a little slip of paper containing his request for documents. He was deep into research for what would become Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West, exploring how the postal service, working with private entrepreneurs, played a central role in extending the federal government’s reach to the Pacific.

A Wall Street Journal reviewer will go on to call the book “a wonderful example of digital history built on information technology and archival research.” First, though, came the search.

Five, 10, 15 minutes went by before a trolley rolled toward Blevins bearing archival boxes filled with letters from the 1850s through the 1890s.

“You feel like a kid in a candy store,” he says. “The archives are where you find little windows into the past. You look through the catalog to try to find things you can metaphorically unwrap. It’s magical.”

Blevins originally came west from New London, Connecticut, to attend Pomona. In his first semester, his life changed when he wowed Professor of History Sam Yamashita with his paper about major league baseball players’ barnstorming tour of 1930s Japan. “He found it fascinating,” Blevins recalls. “I remember him saying, ‘If you wanted to, you could do this as a career.’ I hadn’t thought until then that this was something I could do for a living. It got my wheels turning.”

Thanks to a Pomona research grant, his sophomore summer he mastered GIS (geographic information system) software and used it to map the landholdings of Venture Smith, an enslaved man who bought his freedom in colonial Connecticut. “This was absolutely transformative for me in my career,” says Blevins, who earned his Ph.D. in history from Stanford. “Pomona supported my research and gave me the independence to spend a summer digging in archives and learning this technology. I’m not sure I would’ve had the same career trajectory if I hadn’t had this experience. It opened my eyes to the potential of technology to study the past and propelled me down this road toward the digital humanities.”

The realm of computational analysis and data visualization offered Blevins a new way to bring history to life. It didn’t replace—and still depended on—the time-intensive work of archival research at places like the Huntington, sifting through box after box of dead-end materials penned in indecipherable script to find the few that will matter. He describes that process as a “combination of excitement, hoping and lots of waiting.”

“All historians have an experience where you’re in the archives and come across some document, and a thrill runs through you. Maybe it’s something personalized, individualized—a human being I’ve been thinking about. I’m able to see him in front of me.”

Blevins would experience such a thrill during his research. But first came the wider context.

“History,” says Blevins, “is not some magic bullet to let you predict the future or avoid mistakes, but it is absolutely crucial for understanding the state of the world and society.”

Historians of the Western frontier once told tales of glorious conquest. In his multivolume book The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt, who became president of the American Historical Association a few years after serving as president of the United States, proclaimed it was “our manifest destiny to swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.”

The pattern of conquest is “pretty dark,” Blevins says. “The history of the United States is based on two inescapable facts—African slavery and the forced dispossession and attempted extermination of Native people. That’s inescapable and a vitally important part of our history,” he adds. “You can’t understand how we got where we are today without coming face to face with those facts. All of us are sitting on plundered land. That is something our nation needs to face.”

Paper Trails tells how an institution as seemingly benign as the post office helped enable the military and settlers to bring destruction to Native Americans. “The American state’s violent campaigns were conducted with envelopes as well as rifles,” writes Blevins.

The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 opened the floodgates for westward expansion, and the forcible displacement of Native Americans accelerated in the 1830s. The postal system continued the westward march.

USA existing native lands compared to post offices in 1848.
US Post Office (exact location)
US Post Office (approximate location)
Native Lands
Reservations

Between 1848 and 1895, the federal government opened 24,000 post offices in the western United States. By 1889, the U.S. had 59,000 of those offices nationwide and 400,000 miles of mail routes—a system larger than any other nation’s. (Blevins notes that by comparison, there are fewer than 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S.)

He calls this sprawling, fast-moving system a “gossamer network”—as intricate and ephemeral as a spider’s web—that expanded and shrank with each gust of population movement. Some 48,000 post offices closed, changed names or moved during this unstable period. “What surprised me was the speed with which the network could extend these tendrils into really distant places and then also contract,” says Blevins. “Post offices would sprout up in a mining camp and disappear two years later.”

USA existing native land reservations compared to post offices in 1893.
US Post Office (exact location)
US Post Office (approximate location)
Native Lands
Reservations

The rapid westward growth of post offices was “a subtle, unexpected system” that accelerated settlers’ migration and violent military oppression, Blevins argues. He believes that the post office’s role in hastening westward migration and armed conflict was so ubiquitous that historians failed to see it.

“Again and again, the protection of [mail] transportation corridors provided a pretext for military action,” Blevins writes. One western officer griped, “Except to guard the El Paso Mail I am unable to discover the necessity for a single soldier at this post.”

True to the data visualization work that Blevins began as a student, Paper Trails emerged from the use of digital history and interactive maps and charts. A visit to gossamernetwork.com, the book’s companion website made in collaboration with designer Yan Wu, reveals clusters and sprinklings of hundreds of pink, purple and blue dots that represent remote post offices in places like Skull Valley, Arizona (established 1869, still operating); Spotted Horse, Montana (established 1890, discontinued 1892); and Mud Meadows, Nevada (established 1867, discontinued 1867). With a computer click one can watch them suddenly appear near gold strikes or materialize in lines as straight as railroad tracks.

Run by contractors who filled local needs as they arose, the postal system expanded so rapidly that its Washington overseers could barely track its growth. “The extension of the mail service was unquestionably far in advance of the actual needs of the country. …It is questionable whether the good accomplished in the remote regions of the West compensated for the positive evil which resulted,” Postmaster General Thomas James wrote in 1881, referring to postal service corruption, not wars.

“As humans, we want tidy morality stories with something as a force for good or evil. Of course, it’s never like that,” says Blevins. “What I see as important is less understanding this period in history, but to think about how large networks, systems and structures shape modern life for good or bad.”

He sees striking parallels to today’s tech companies. “We could go into the way something like Facebook amplifies misinformation. But it’s not like people in its headquarters are scheming how to break American democracy,” says Blevins. “It’s that they put things in motion—things they sometimes don’t understand—or they don’t think about the consequences of structures they set up. It’s less about trying to assign individual blame to a company but trying to think about those underlying algorithms that drive misinformation or radicalization.”

There is another side to Blevins’ work beyond analyzing data and systems. They provided powerful insight, but he still had to find the human stories to bring this history of the immense postal system to life. That proved a tougher quest than Blevins expected. “I went into archives expecting 19th-century Americans to be writing about this amazing network and ‘Isn’t it incredible I’m able to communicate with people 3,000 miles away for the cost of a two-cent stamp?’” Instead, he “heard crickets. When things are vast and wrapped into daily life, people don’t talk about them as much as you’d expect.”

But on that day in the Ahmanson Reading Room, after Blevins had pored through box after box of unusable materials, the trolley stopped at his table, delivering one that would yield an entire chapter in Paper Trails.

It contained dozens of letters written from the 1850s to the 1890s by Benjamin Curtis and his sisters Sarah, Delia and Jamie. Orphaned in 1852, they had been sent to live with relatives in Massachusetts, Tennessee, Ohio and Illinois. But thanks to the U.S. Post Office, they stayed in touch, especially when they all moved west to equally remote Wyoming, California, Idaho and Arizona.

One of Blevins’ favorite letters is from Benjamin to Delia on September 8, 1886. She is in San Diego. He is homesteading in Arizona’s Salt River Valley, east of Phoenix. The nearest town is 30 miles away, but the post office opened a branch two miles from him in Armer and another three miles away in Catalpa. His wife has given birth to a 9-pound baby daughter. “It is a trying time for any mother, and although it is 100 degrees in this room she does not complain,” Benjamin writes and then tells Delia they named the baby after her.

“We think it is just the nicest baby ever born,” he boasts. “Only it don’t take after its father, for it has plenty of hair on top of its head.”

Lo and behold, in the file Blevins found a photograph of Benjamin, who was far balder than the baby. It was a “humanizing moment” for Blevins as he sifted through the letters offering “beautiful, intimate glimpses” into the siblings’ relationships over decades.

Although cool-headed computer calculations drive the scholarship behind Paper Trails, the heart of the book beats with human stories. Blevins’ gossamer network of outposts on a map ultimately reveals the vast distances that have always existed in America as well as the ties that bind us together.