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4 books match the query 'Postal service'

cover of Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America

Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America

Wayne E. Fuller

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America explores the evolution of postal innovations that sparked a communication revolution in nineteenth-century America. Wayne E. Fuller examines how evangelical Protestants, the nation’s dominant religious group, struggled against those transformations in American society that they believed threatened to paganize the Christian nation they were determined to save.

Drawing on House and Senate documents, postmasters general reports, and the Congressional Record, as well as sermons, speeches, and articles from numerous religious and secular periodicals, Fuller illuminates the problems the changed postal system posed for evangelicals, from Sunday mail delivery and Sunday newspapers to an avalanche of unseemly material brought into American homes via improved mail service and reduced postage prices. Along the way, Fuller offers new perspectives on the church and state controversy in the United States as well as on publishing, politics, birth control, the lottery, censorship, Congress’s postal power, and the waning of evangelical Protestant influence.
 
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cover of The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life

The American Mail

Enlarger of the Common Life

Wayne E. Fuller

University of Chicago Press, 1972

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cover of The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America

The Postal Age

The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America

David M. Henkin

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Americans commonly recognize television, e-mail, and instant messaging as agents of pervasive cultural change. But many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary. As David M. Henkin argues in The Postal Age, a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the nineteenth century, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications. 

This fascinating history traces these shifts from their beginnings in the mid-1800s, when cheaper postage, mass literacy, and migration combined to make the long-established postal service a more integral and viable part of everyday life. With such dramatic events as the Civil War and the gold rush underscoring the importance and necessity of the post, a surprisingly broad range of Americans—male and female, black and white, native-born and immigrant—joined this postal network, regularly interacting with distant locales before the existence of telephones or even the widespread use of telegraphy. Drawing on original letters and diaries from the period, as well as public discussions of the expanding postal system, Henkin tells the story of how these Americans adjusted to a new world of long-distance correspondence, crowded post offices, junk mail, valentines, and dead letters.

The Postal Age paints a vibrant picture of a society where possibilities proliferated for the kinds of personal and impersonal communications that we often associate with more recent historical periods. In doing so, it significantly increases our understanding of both antebellum America and our own chapter in the history of communications.

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cover of Trollope in the Post Office

Trollope in the Post Office

R. H. Super

University of Michigan Press, 1981

The works of Anthony Trollope are currently enjoying a popularity not seen since the success they met during his lifetime, a success that obscured until long after his death the true nature and extent of his literary merit. With this new found popularity has come a flurry of publishing about Trollope, primarily criticisms of the novels. Professor Super provides for the first time a scholarly examination of Trollope’s life — not his life as a writer who wrote 2,500 words every morning and published about four dozen novels — but his other life, his professional life with the British Post Office. Trollope was a civil servant before he was a novelist. For thirty-four years, from age nineteen to age fifty-two, he served the Post Office in assignments that gave him a detailed famillarity with Ireland, England, and Wales, and a personal acquaintance with the postal patrons. As a roving ambassador for the Post Office, he went to the West Indies, the Near East, and the United States. The book draws for the first time on the extensive records of Trollope’s career preserved in the Post Office archives in London. Interweaving these materials with other sources ofinformation, Professor Super presents, with meticulous scholarship and lucid style, the interrelation between Trollope’s Post Office work and his books.
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