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A USPS postal worker pulling a cart of mail through a snow storm.

How Mailmen Saved Rural America

Amazon will never be neighbourly.
by Jeff Bloodworth via UnHerd on November 25, 2024
Fingerspelling alphabet.

Deafness Is Not a Silence

On the suppression of sign language.
by Sarah Marsh via The Millions on March 14, 2024
Colorful, psychedelic illustration of three dolphins in the center with a rainbow in the sky above them and a pool, ocean, palm trees, and sky below them

Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab

How a 1960s interspecies communication experiment went haywire.
by Benjamin Breen via The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 27, 2024
Illustration of hands signing the fingerspelling alphabet

Unlocking Reason: How the Deaf Created Their Own System of Communication

Exploring Deaf history, language and education as the hearing child of a Deaf adult.
by Moshe Kasher via Literary Hub on January 22, 2024

What Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” Can Teach the Modern Worker

Dale Carnegie treated the employee-employer relationship as a sacred, symbiotic bond.
by Jessica Weisberg via The New Yorker on April 2, 2018

How the Civil War Taught Americans the Art of Letter Writing

Soldiers and their families, sometimes barely literate, wrote to assuage fear and convey love.
by Christopher Hager via Smithsonian on January 22, 2018
Arthur Zimmerman and his intercepted telegram.

Worse Than Signalgate

Accidentally sharing attack plans in a group chat is bad. Causing a rising superpower to declare war on you because of a Western Union telegram is worse.
by Timothy W. Ryback via The Atlantic on April 11, 2025
A photograph of Frederick Douglass imposed on the cover of The Columbian Orator by Caleb Bingham.

The Columbian Orator Taught Nineteenth-Century Americans How to Speak

For strivers like Lincoln, guides to rhetoric had a special currency in the nineteenth century.
by Danny Heitman via Humanities on April 2, 2025
A U.S. Postal Service employee loading a van with mail.

How Mail Delivery Has Shaped America

The United States Postal Service is under federal scrutiny. It’s not the first time.
by Sarah Prager via JSTOR Daily on March 12, 2025
An illustration of space, with two silhouettes of heads overlapping.

The Fraught U.S.-Soviet Search for Alien Life

During the Cold War, American and Soviet scientists embarked on an unprecedented quest to contact extraterrestrials.
by Sophie Pinkham via The New Yorker on February 6, 2025
1999 Yugoslavian stamp depicting a NATO jet launching a missile at an oil refinery.

Stamps Capture Unchanging Face of U.S. Violence Abroad

Countries have also used their postal systems to fight back against aggression.
by Matin Modarressi via Foreign Policy in Focus on January 6, 2025
Sound waves.

Listening Devices

The veterans of Kagnew Station saw the early growth of the surveillance state. Has the passage of time given them a new understanding of their work?
by Ann Neumann via The Baffler on January 6, 2025
Collage of Jimmy Carter reading documents, and excerpts of documents he notated.

Jimmy Carter: A Declassified Obituary

Highest-level national security documents reveal a tough-minded, detail-oriented president.
by Malcolm Byrne, Autumn Kladder via National Security Archive on December 29, 2024
Destruction in the aftermath of the Galveston disaster, 1900.

Lessons from America’s Deadliest Natural Disaster

The 1900 Galveston hurricane changed the way we deal with severe weather. But as Hurricane Helene showed, there are still lessons to be learned.
by Teresa Bitler via The Saturday Evening Post on December 2, 2024
Paper and an ink pen.

Call Me Comrade: Cold War Pen-Pals

The correspondence of Soviet and American women during the Cold War.
by Miriam Dobson via London Review of Books on October 17, 2024
Phil Donahue.

Phil Donahue’s Cold War Legacy

The late telejournalist was a pioneer of informal diplomacy between American and Soviet citizens.
by Adriel Kasonta via The American Conservative on September 25, 2024
Civil Defense warning.

The Occasion Instant, 1961

What can be learned from how people responded to false alarms about nuclear war in the late 1950s?
by Alex Wellerstein via Doomsday Machines on September 11, 2024
The original cover sketch of "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," by Richard Scarry, with cartoon animals in vehicles.

On Richard Scarry and the Art of Children's Literature

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.
by Chris Ware via The Yale Review on September 9, 2024
Costumed man and tourists in Colonial Williamsburg.

Where MAGA Granddads and Resistance Moms Go to Learn America’s Most Painful History Lessons

Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg, the largest living museum that is taking a radical approach to our national divides.
by Laura Jedeed via Politico Magazine on August 31, 2024
Victorian telegraph operator.

What Mark Zuckerberg Should Learn From 19th-Century Telegraph Operators

No, really.
by Megan Ward via Slate on May 27, 2024
Image of a man distributing newspapers at a post office.

The Post Office and Privacy

We can thank the postal service for establishing the foundations of the American tradition of communications confidentiality.
by Matthew Wills, Anuj Desai via JSTOR Daily on May 19, 2024
partner

Alt Text

A brief history of the textfile, and the production of conspiracy theories on the internet.
by Walter J. Scheirer via HNN on May 8, 2024
A billboard next to a road that reads, "Hell is real."

How 19th-Century Spiritualists ‘Canceled’ the Idea of Hell to Address Social and Political Concerns

Spiritualists believed that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey and help those on Earth create a more just world.
by Lindsay DiCuirci via The Conversation on May 8, 2024
Séance with spirit manifestation, 1872, by John Beattie.

Immortalizing Words

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.
by Ashley C. Barnes via The Hedgehog Review on April 30, 2024
A large crowd listening to Harry Truman give a speech on a train.

Harry Truman's Train Ride

A whistle-stop train tour, and some plain speaking spur Harry Truman's come from behind win in 1948 over Thomas Dewey.
by Michael Liss via 3 Quarks Daily on March 25, 2024
Rose Mackenberg.

The Ghost-Busting 'Girl Detective' Who Awed Houdini

As an undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg unmasked hundreds of America’s fake psychics.
by Nina Strochlic via Atlas Obscura on March 14, 2024
No parking sign.

The No Symbol: The History Of The Red Circle-Slash

One of the best-known icons of modern society is a classic example of a symbol—it’s easy to spot, but hard to explain. Who came up with it?
by Ernie Smith via Tedium on March 9, 2024
Gloved hand holding COVID-19-shaped dandelion

Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?

The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on February 19, 2024
A parade in Rio de Janeiro consisting of Brazilian Expeditionary Force soldiers and American 10th Mountain Division soldiers.

Skis, Samba, and Smoking Snakes: An Unlikely World War II Partnership

What happened when glacier-goggled American ski troops and samba-loving Brazilian soldiers fought side-by-side halfway across the world?
by Carson Teuscher via Origins on January 13, 2024
Illustration of "American" birds flying and holding American English words

When American Words Invaded the Greatest English Dictionary

Slips of paper with peculiar regional terms crossed the Atlantic to Oxford and into the pages of a 70-year lexicographical project.
by Sarah Ogilvie via The Wall Street Journal on November 10, 2023
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