Christopher W. Shaw
American historian and author

Christopher W. Shaw is an American historian, author, and policy analyst. In 2013, Shaw earned a PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. One of the primary focuses of his research has been the history of the United States Postal Service and its decline in recent decades, particularly due to the actions of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He was one of the first to recommend restarting postal banking in 2006, and has continued to promote this idea. Shaw is a project director at Ralph Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law.
Research and works
Shaw's 2019 book Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic covered the history of the American banking system during the Progressive Era and the New Deal era, along with how events such as the Great Depression affected the public's trust in the system. The focus of the book is revealing the impact of collective action by working people on the U.S. banking system. This includes creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, United States Postal Savings System, and Federal Farm Loan Act. The book covers all of this, but parts also are in journal articles. It also includes how collective action by working people reduced the influence of bankers on the Federal Reserve System in the Banking Act of 1935.
The public source identifies “Christopher W. Shaw” as american historian and author. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Christopher, Shaw and American.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q117554086. VIAF identifies the subject as 58533697. The Library of Congress control number is n2007060651. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2006, 2019 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christopher W. Shaw” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.