The historian who turned the story of France and Britain in North America into gripping narrative, from the Prominent Americans definitives.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Catalog Number: Scott #1281

• Denomination: 3 cents (3¢)

• Date of Issue: September 16, 1967

• Printing Method: Rotary Press, Engraved (Intaglio)

• Perforation: 11 × 10½

• Color: Violet

• Subject: Portrait of Francis Parkman, American historian

• Format: Definitive single, Prominent Americans series (sheet stamp)

CONDITION ANALYSIS (Seller-Assessed)

• Status: Used

• Grading: Fine

• Postmark: Light black machine postmark of faint wavy lines across the portrait. The Parkman portrait and text remain clearly readable.

• Obverse: The portrait, the name and profession panel, the country inscription, and the 3¢ denomination are all sharp and identifiable.

• Reverse: No original gum present, as expected for a used stamp. The paper shows a few small foxing specks and a light corner wrinkle, with no tears or thinning visible.

• Centering / Margins: The design is well framed, with a slight leftward shift. 

• Perforations: Intact on all four sides.

HISTORY

Francis Parkman was one of the great narrative historians America produced in the nineteenth century, a writer who treated the past as a story to be told rather than a set of dates to be memorized. His life's work was a multi-volume history of the long struggle between France and Britain for control of North America, culminating in the fall of New France. It reads more like an epic than a textbook, and it shaped how generations of Americans understood the colonial frontier.

Parkman worked under real hardship. He suffered from poor eyesight, chronic illness, and nervous strain so severe that at times he could write only a few lines a day, using a wooden frame to guide his hand across the page. To research the wilderness he wrote about, he traveled the Oregon Trail as a young man and lived among the Sioux, an experience he turned into his first popular book.

This stamp belongs to the Prominent Americans series, the workhorse definitives the Post Office issued through the 1960s and 1970s. Released September 16, 1967, in violet, it put a serious historian on everyday mail, a quiet reminder that some of the country's most enduring storytellers worked in nonfiction.

STEVEN SAYS

Parkman wrote sweeping history books while half blind and often too sick to work more than a few lines a day. He even traveled the Oregon Trail to research the frontier firsthand. This is the regular sheet stamp, by the way, not the coil, which is the same design with two straight edges.