Postal History Mail Sales

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History is something which shouldn't be forgotten. The truth, and perhaps more to the point, what our leaders tell us is the truth, is fundamental to our political and economical decision-making processes.

At the end of 1918 the German Navy mutinied at Wilhelmshaven and German Communists determined that the collapse of capitalism had finally arrived and seized power in Munich, Berlin, and Leipzig. Meanwhile the Freikorps, fragments of the German army, fought on in the East against Baltic nationalists for months after the end of WWI. Was this important? The returning Freikorps crushed the Communist uprising but also turned the Weimar Republic into an armed camp of competing paramilitary and political groups until the National Socialists staged a democratic coup and took over in 1933.

In 1840 the British fought a war with China in order to force the importation of opium. In 1900, while Great Britain was embroiled in the Boer War, the Empress Dowager of China allowed a paramilitary martial-arts cult called the Boxers to ambush foreign embassies in Peking -- as a result the Allies, including America, Britain, France and Germany, invaded and sacked the coast of China. Do you think these conflicts still affect China's relationship with the West?

Gothic Postal History offers primary source material such as covers, letters, maps, pamphlets, photographs, and real photo postcards (RPPC's) for the study of world history between 1850 and 1950. For better or worse, those people who lived, fought, and sacrificed their lives shaped the world we live in; we need to understand their motives and actions, in large part to avoid repeating them.