Postage stamps and postal history of the United States a precondition for their issue by a nation was the establishment of standardized rates for delivery throughout the country. If postal fees were to remain (as they were in many lands) a patchwork of many different jurisdictional rates, the use of stamps would only produce limited gains in efficiency, for postal clerks would still have to spend time calculating the rates on many letters: only then would senders know how much postage to put on them. The introduction of postage stamps in the UK in May 1840 was received with great interest in the United States (and around the world).
Postage stamps and postal history of Mexico Just as there is no consensus on what constitutes "classic stamps" in general, there is no agreement on what is the "classic period" for stamps of Mexico. In 1926, Samuel Chapman in his "The Postage Stamps of Mexico", referred to the "provisional period" as running from 1856 to 1868. In 1983, Schatzkès & Schimmer published a study of "the Cancellations of Mexico from 1856-1874", but they did not specifically call that the "classic period." Pulver in his "Introduction to the Stamps of Mexico" (1992) included a chapter entitled "Classic Era 1856-1883." Including 1883 as the end of the classic period