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.”

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.”