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Stamps and flight have both had roles in state propaganda machines at various times and never more so than in Italy in the 1930’s. Bennito Mussolini came to power in the early 1920’s and one of the goals of Italian fascism was to increase the Italian sense of identity as a way of uniting the

Nepal is bound in the north by the Himalayan mountains and in the south there is a fertile plain that eases into the Indian heartland. The neighbor to the north, Tibet, is inaccessible because of the more than four mile high mountains so the land to the south, India, has always had great influence on

In many ways, Ethiopia is a land that time forgot. Always independent, Ethiopia was ruled by a monarchy that traced its origins back to the second century. Because of its strong internal government, Ethiopia was one of the two African countries that was able to resist the European imperialism of the nineteenth century and retain

The political history of South Africa is fascinating. Originally settled by the Dutch in the sixteenth century, South African areas long bounced back and forth under control of the Boers (as the native Dutch decedents were called), the British, who added South Africa to their list of imperial ambitions in the eighteenth century, and native

Anjouan is part of the Comoro Islands group which are a small group of islands between Madagascar and Africa. The islands were long a French dependency and for a brief period around the turn of the last century issued their own postage stamps. The stamps are part of the design called the Peace and Commerce

Civilization requires communication. As societies have developed, communication has developed with it, both for personal use and for commerce. Throughout the early stamp issuing period many different ways have been tried to speed mail delivery (and remember before electronic communication, the only way to communicate at a distance was by the post). Postal agencies tried

Collecting airmail stamps was a far more popular specialty half a century ago than it is today. Airmail was a major technological advance in communications. Before 1920 the quickest any paper communication could get from one place to another was approximately five hundred miles a day providing expensive railroad lines had been laid. Railroads were

There are an increasing number of philatelocracies-countries that exist largely to issue stamps and whose independent political status is made possible by the revenues generated by the sale of philatelic items. There are scores of philatelocracies now-places like the Grenadines of St Vincent or Guernsey- places which exist because of sales of stamps to collectors.