If any of you are looking for something to read this fall, might I suggest David Henkin’s The Postal Age. It will appeal to a wide range of historically-minded readerships.
A series of reforms in the pricing of the federal mail during the 1840s and 1850s widened the availability of postal service to ordinary Americans. David Henkin’s The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America explores how the subsequent explosion in the volume of interpersonal correspondence led to the development of an American “postal culture.”
Personal habits and norms developed around a new system of interconnectedness which enabled distant friends and family to remain in intimate contact.