David M. Henkin is associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of City Reading.
"The Postal Age develops a strong case for studying the
developmental interplay of communication technologies, publics, and
practices of reading, seeing, and writing as constitutive of self,
other, and nation. . . . By sensitively addressing the cultural
implications of changing patterns of participation and use of mail
exchange, [the book] advances scholarship on the role of the post
in everyday life."--Derek W. Valliant "New England Quarterly"
"For the first half century of [the U.S. Postal Service's]
founding, its main function was to circulate newspapers to a
national audience. . . . That all changed in 1845 when Congress
enacted the first in a series of laws that sharply reduced the cost
of sending letters. The new rates led to a vast surge in personal
correspondence. They set up a communications revolution that the
historian David Henkin has chronicled in an engaging new book
called The Postal Age."--Geoff Nunberg "Fresh Air"
"Henkin is something of a model for at once taking seriously and
moving beyond his theoretical sources; by engaging the complex
particulars of the past, he produces a more compelling account of
the making and remaking of American public life. . . . What Henkin
is in the process of achieving--with City Reading and The Postal
Age as the first two parts--is a thoroughgoing reimagining of the
inner worlds of antebellum Americans. . . . Like Tocqueville,
Henkin manages to suggest a proper note of awe in the face of the
communications revolution of the middle of the nineteenth century.
There is something similarly wondrous about his achievement in this
book." --David Quigley, Reviews in American History--David Quigley
"Reviews in American History"
"The Postal Age is a remarkable achievement. With elegance,
analytical precision, and a firm command of the sources, Henkin
shows how mid-nineteenth century Americans became a nation of
letter-writers. In so doing, he offers fresh insights into several
well-known events--including the Gold Rush and the Civil War--while
inviting us to ponder the extent to which the postal system, and
not the electric telegraph, laid the cultural foundations not only
for modern telecommunications, but also for the habits of
interconnectedness that are such a touchstone of
modernity."Spreading the News: The American Postal System from
Franklin to Morse>--Richard R. John, author of Spreading the
News: The American Postal System from F
"The Postal Age succeeds in joining two kinds of history writing:
the thoroughly professional and the engagingly popular. David M.
Henkin offers a clinic in how to combine social analysis of
institutions with cultural study of the rituals, emotions, and
meanings by which people pattern their lives."--Richard Wightman
Fox, author of Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero,
National Obsession
"David Henkin's The Postal Age is a brilliant successor to his
earlier City Reading, and continues his insightful investigations
of communications and social life. The Postal Age is engagingly
written, rich with anecdotes and observations that dramatize and
illuminate the manifold facets of 'postal culture' in the
antebellum United States. Americans took advantage of a growing and
increasingly accessible postal system to exchange money, news,
seeds, daguerreotypes, love letters, and anonymous valentines (not
to mention the earliest forms of spam and junk mail), transforming
courtship, commerce, and civic life. At every stage, Henkin avoids
the temptations of crass determinism to offer a nuanced view of the
complicated relationships between technologies and systems and
social forms. The Postal Age is a major contribution to American
social history and to the history of communications in
general."Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in
Controversial Times>--Nunberg, author of Going Nucular:
Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversi
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