By David M. Henkin
Americans regularly realize tv, email, and quick messaging as brokers of pervasive cultural swap. yet many people won't discover that what we now name snail mail was simply as innovative. As David M. Henkin argues in The Postal Age, a burgeoning postal community initiated significant cultural shifts in the course of the 19th century, laying the root for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving international of telecommunications. This attention-grabbing historical past strains those shifts from their beginnings within the mid-1800s, while more affordable postage, mass literacy, and migration mixed to make the common postal carrier a extra necessary and conceivable a part of way of life. With such dramatic occasions because the Civil struggle and the gold rush underscoring the significance and necessity of the put up, an incredibly extensive variety of Americans—male and feminine, black and white, native-born and immigrant—joined this postal community, on a regular basis interacting with far-off locales prior to the lifestyles of phones or maybe the frequent use of telegraphy. Drawing on unique letters and diaries from the interval, in addition to public discussions of the increasing postal method, Henkin tells the tale of the way those americans adjusted to a brand new global of long-distance correspondence, crowded publish workplaces, unsolicited mail, valentines, and lifeless letters. The Postal Age paints a colourful photograph of a society the place probabilities proliferated for the categories of private and impersonal communications that we regularly go along with newer old sessions. In doing so, it considerably raises our knowing of either antebellum the USA and our personal bankruptcy within the background of communications.
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Additional resources for The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America
Sample text
30 Thomas Watkins, a Mississippi plantation owner, wrote in 1848 to his thirteen-year-old daughter (away at school in Tennessee) that “[y]ou have improved in letter writing & I am glad of it. ” The girl’s mother offered some faint praise along the same lines two months later: “You wrote to know if I did not think you have improved in writing. ” In one of her many letters to her Gold Rush husband, Mary Wingate coaxed a brief, penciled contribution from her young daughter Lucy: “I want you to come home as soon as you can for we are very lonely without you.
The postage reforms narrowed the gap a bit, but did not eliminate it. 59 BECOMING POST AL S 33 Race was also a significant divide in the American postal network, largely because the majority of African Americans living in the United States were illiterate, poor, and subject to severe legal (and other) restrictions. Still, both slaves and free blacks used the post to a striking degree. 60 The access of enslaved men and women in the South to the post office varied widely. 61 In other situations and under different circumstances, slaves could encounter serious obstacles to their participation in the postal network.
By mid-century a demographic foundation for popular participation in the postal system had been laid. The massive mobilization of Americans—male and female, black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native—was a development rather CHAPT ER ONE S 30 than a sudden occurrence, though a number of dramatic events (such as those examined in chapter 5) helped facilitate and broadcast this ongoing phenomenon as something distinct and momentous. Migrations, mobilizations, and dislocations belong to the history of the postal revolution; they were effects as well as causes of the transformation of the mail into a mass ritual.