Awards, History

David Henkin receives U.S. Postal Service Award

jacket image According to a recent press release from the U.S. Postal Service, David Henkin, author of The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America will receive the first ever Rita Lloyd Moroney Award for scholarship on the history of the United States postal system. The press release states the award is “designed to encourage scholarship on the history of the United States postal system and to raise awareness about the significance of the postal system in American life.” And certainly Henkin’s nuanced history of the burgeoning nineteenth-century postal network does just that. 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 the postal network transformed nineteenth-century American society, laying the foundation for the interconnectedness that now defines our ever-evolving world of telecommunications.
We have an excerpt from the book.