1937 5c Seal of U.S. Naval Academy, Ultramarine

U.S. #794
1937 5¢ Seal of U.S. Naval Academy
Army and Navy

Issue Date: May 26, 1937
First City: Annapolis, MD
Quantity Issued: 36,819,050

This stamp closed out the Army and Navy commemorative series, a set of ten stamps issued between December 1936 and May 1937 honoring prominent figures and institutions from American military history. President Theodore Roosevelt had first pushed for such a series decades earlier, but the project only came to life under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself an avid stamp collector who took a personal interest in the designs issued during his administration. The series paired Army and Navy stamps of matching denominations, released together across five separate dates, each pair honoring figures and events from a different era of American military history, from the Revolutionary War through the Spanish American War.

While the four earlier pairs in the series focused on individual military leaders, this final Navy stamp shifted its focus to the United States Naval Academy itself, depicting the school's official seal alongside figures representing a midshipman and a sailor. The Naval Academy had been established in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1845, replacing an earlier naval training school that had operated in Philadelphia since 1838. Fittingly, this stamp received its first day of issue at Annapolis, home to the academy it depicted, continuing the series' practice of tying each stamp's release to a location connected to its subject.

Alongside its companion Army stamp honoring the United States Military Academy at West Point, this final pair rounded out the ten stamp series by shifting focus from individual heroes to the institutions responsible for training the nation's military officers. Together, the full Army and Navy series offered a compact visual survey of American military history, moving chronologically from the Revolutionary War era through the academies still shaping the country's armed forces in the twentieth century.