Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.

John does not tell us whether he collected stamps in his youth, but the United States Postal Service would be well advised to issue a commemorative in his honor. No scholar has tried harder to treat its early history as something more than a prosaic chapter in the epic of American public administration. For John, the achievements and failures of the postal service should not be seen as mere reflections of prevailing attitudes about the character of the American state, but as an independent force acting on the political culture at large.

At times, Spreading the News threatens to say more about its subject than we want to know, but it does so in an effort to raise new …