BackStory

Mentioned on the Show:

•  Corbett, Christopher.  Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express.  Portland, OR: Broadway Books, 2003.

• Henkin, David M.  The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

• John, Richard R. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

• Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: Library of America, 2004.

• National Postal Museum

• The United States Postal Service.  “Alexis de Tocqueville.” In The United States Postal Service: An American History, 1775-2006.  Washington, D.C.: The United States Postal Service, 2007.

 Outside Links:

• “Put Zip in Your Postal System”: Zip code campaign public service announcement

• Sesame Street visits a mailman in Appalachia

• Letters of Note: A website highlighting lovely letters written and received

• Letters in the Mail: Sign up and receive a handwritten letter from a famous writer each week

Works Consulted:

• Rubio, Philip F. There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African-American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

• Merciea, Jennifer Rose. “The Culture of Honor: How Slaveholders Responded to the Abolitionist Mail Crisis of 1835.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (2007): 51-76.

• Wyly-Jones, Susan. “The 1835 Anti-Abolition Meeting in the South: A New Look at the Controversy over the Abolition Postal Campaign.” Civil War History 47, no. 4 (2001): 289-309.