Before we became a nation of e-mailing, text-messaging, Blackberrying technology addicts, we had to become a nation of letter writers. Why? The postal system, as David Henkin argues in his engrossing new history, laid the cultural foundations for both today’s telecommunications and the habits of interconnectedness that continue to reshape our society. Drawing us into the strikingly familiar yet intriguingly distant world of antebellum America’s burgeoning postal culture, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America tells the fascinating story of the birth of modern communication.
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