New York

After World War II, the ideas of the United Nations was proposed in the hopes of preventing wars. On April 25, 1945, fifty nations met in San Francisco, California and drafted a Charter, which was approved on June 25, takingk effect on October 24 of that same year.

The U.N.’s objectives, defined in the charter, include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development, and upholding international law.

On November 16, 1950, the U.N. Postal Administration was started and became a member of the Universal Postal Union. The U.S. Postal Administration entered into an agreement with the U.N. Post to accept letter from them only if U.N. stamps were in U.S. dollars, and used only at the U.N. headquarters. As a result, an office in the U.N. headquarters in New York was opened for mailing letters and packages. It opened and issued its first stamps on October 24, 1951.

When you look through the stamps in this album, you’ll see many stamps commemorating these events, marking the dates, and promoting the U.N. Charter and its goals.

Note

For my U.N. collection, I previously had them in a stock book. Recently, I’ve replaced it with album pages from Lighthouse (Leuchtturm). Although the U.N. continues to issue stamps past 1999, I don’t yet have the album pages for the later years. Once I get more pages, I’ll scan them and upload them to this site. Of the pages I have here, I have all of the stamps in this album.