Use in The United States
In August 1852 an act of the U.S. Congress authorized the Postmaster General to provide "suitable letter envelopes with such watermarks or other guards against counterfeits... with the addition of the value or denomination of the postage stamps so printed or impressed thereon...". The first result was the 1853 Nesbitt issues of stamped envelopes, named after the private contractor who produced them for the government. When you combine the different envelope sizes, knives, colors, dies to print the indicia, and denominations there are literally thousands of different stamped envelopes produced for the U.S.
Read more about this topic: Stamped Envelope
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united and/or states:
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)