Download or read book How the Post Office Created America written by Winifred Gallagher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development. The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. government’s largest and most important endeavor—indeed, it was the government for most citizens. This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen—a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers. America’s uniquely democratic post powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the world’s information and communications superpower with astonishing speed. Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America’s own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail—then “the media”—imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices. The post was the catalyst of the nation’s transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, the consumer culture, and the political party system. Still one of the country’s two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, African Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life. Starved by two world wars and the Great Depression, confronted with the country’s increasingly anti-institutional mind-set, and struggling with its doubled mail volume, the post stumbled badly in the turbulent 1960s. Distracted by the ensuing modernization of its traditional services, however, it failed to transition from paper mail to email, which prescient observers saw as its logical next step. Now the post office is at a crossroads. Before deciding its future, Americans should understand what this grand yet overlooked institution has accomplished since 1775 and consider what it should and could contribute in the twenty-first century. Gallagher argues that now, more than ever before, the imperiled post office deserves this effort, because just as the founders anticipated, it created forward-looking, communication-oriented, idea-driven America.
Download or read book Railroad Post Office History written by Leo A. McKee and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indexes of railroads / railway post offices / mail route messengers / collection of reprinted articles / cancellations / cars.
Download or read book The American Railroad Passenger Car written by John H. White and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed since its publication as the definitive - and most opulent - book on the subject, The American Railroad Passenger Car is now made available in an unabridged two-part softcover edition.
Download or read book The United States Postal Service written by United States Postal Service Staff and published by . This book was released on 2016-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History of the Railway Mail Service written by United States. Railway Mail Service and published by . This book was released on 1885 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Tootin Louie written by Donovan L. Hofsommer and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of one of the Midwest's most remarkable railroads.
Download or read book The Train and the Telegraph written by Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at best—and more often outright antagonists—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century American railroad industry.
Download or read book Neither Snow Nor Rain written by Devin Leonard and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[The] book makes you care what happens to its main protagonist, the U.S. Postal Service itself. And, as such, it leaves you at the end in suspense.” —USA Today Founded by Benjamin Franklin, the United States Postal Service was the information network that bound far-flung Americans together, and yet, it is slowly vanishing. Critics say it is slow and archaic. Mail volume is down. The workforce is shrinking. Post offices are closing. In Neither Snow Nor Rain, journalist Devin Leonard tackles the fascinating, centuries-long history of the USPS, from the first letter carriers through Franklin’s days, when postmasters worked out of their homes and post roads cut new paths through the wilderness. Under Andrew Jackson, the post office was molded into a vast patronage machine, and by the 1870s, over seventy percent of federal employees were postal workers. As the country boomed, USPS aggressively developed new technology, from mobile post offices on railroads and airmail service to mechanical sorting machines and optical character readers. Neither Snow Nor Rain is a rich, multifaceted history, full of remarkable characters, from the stamp-collecting FDR, to the revolutionaries who challenged USPS’s monopoly on mail, to the renegade union members who brought the system—and the country—to a halt in the 1970s. “Delectably readable . . . Leonard’s account offers surprises on almost every other page . . . [and] delivers both the triumphs and travails with clarity, wit and heart.” —Chicago Tribune
Download or read book List of Selected Maps of States and Territories written by and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Railroad Mail Clerks written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad written by John F. Stover and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was the first common carrier railroad in America. As an economic historian, Stover tells the history of the B & O from its beginnings in 1928, and through the dark times of this country's economic growth and downswings. He examines the programs undertaken by the company throughout its history to improve its lines, equipment, and service.
Download or read book Post Office Reform written by Sir Rowland Hill and published by . This book was released on 1837 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Curtailment of Certain Railway Post Offices written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Post Office and Civil Service and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses problems arising from proposed changeovers from railway to other forms of mail transportation.
Download or read book Checklist of United States Public Documents 1789 1909 written by and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Streamliners written by Mike Schafer and published by Voyageur Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Streamliners tells the steamliner story and takes you aboard a wide range of steamliners, from UP's historic M-10000 to America's most talked about train, the California Zephyr, whose descendant was still making tracks across the continent as late as the 1990s"--Back cover.
Download or read book Checklist of United States Public Documents 1789 1909 written by United States. Superintendent of Documents and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 1756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Post Office Appropriation Bill 1917 Railway Mail Pay written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
