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This chapter examines the material and cultural foundations that provided the resources necessary for magazine publishing and the demand necessary to sustain a large number of magazines in locations across America. In particular, it explores a number of fundamental changes in American society that supported the explosive growth and increasing variety of magazines. It first considers basic material supports such as advances in printing and papermaking technologies and the development of the U.S. postal system before discussing the more complex demographic, economic, and cultural supports. These include population growth and urbanization and the rise of various religious, political, and economic communities of readers. In particular, the chapter describes the growth of an increasingly urban, better-educated, more prosperous population, along with the development of copyright law in Britain and America and its impact on cultural conceptions of authorship in both countries.

Law is filled with segmented narratives. The literature mapping the illegalization of the migration of peoples does not reference that many borders have become readily traversable, if not invisible, through the internationalization of mail services by cooperative government efforts. This chapter links these domains not to equate the migration of persons with the movement of objects but rather to clarify how reliant on border crossings we are. The argument is that depending on borders as justifications for legal rules deflects attention from two major shifts during the last two centuries: one imagining the globe as a “single postal territory” and the other turning migration into a crime. In pursuit of both, governments expanded their capacities as providers of services—from forwarding mail to patrolling borders. The aim is to probe whether states’ coordination to facilitate movements of persons seeking to cross boundaries could become a taken-for-granted government service, akin to state-subsidized interjurisdictional, cooperative postal systems.

Paul revere, the american revolutionary, remembered his midnight ride of April 18, 1775, in these words: “I agreed with a Colonel Conant and some other gentlemen, that if the British went out by water, we should shew two lanthornes in the North Church steeple, and if by land, one, as a signal, for we were apprehensive it would be difficult to cross the Charles River, or git over Boston neck.” Eighteen years later, on July 12, 1793, Claude Chappe presented his semaphore telegraph to the Committee of Public Instruction of the French National Convention. At Saint-Fargeau, near Paris, Deputy Pierre Daunou sent a message to Deputy Joseph Lakanal at Saint-Martin-du-Tertre, thirty-five kilometers away: “Daunou has arrived here. He announces that the National Convention has just authorized its committee of general security to affix the seals to the papers of the representatives of the people.” Nine minutes later, Lakanal replied: “The inhabitants of this beautiful country are worthy of liberty because of their love for it and their respect for the National Convention and its laws.” Between these two dates there occurred a revolution in communication. Revere used a simple, prearranged, onetime signal containing only three potential messages: “by land,” “by sea,” or “no news.” Chappe could communicate any message, in either direction, faster than a galloping horse. This was only one of several great changes in communication that occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under the pressure of revolution and war. Humans are gifted, both naturally and culturally, at communicating face-to-face. Long-distance communications, however, require elaborate systems to convey information to its destination in a timely manner. Over-coming distances is but one of the functions of communication systems. We must also draw a distinction between the transmission of information from one person to another, for example, by speech, letter, telephone, telegram, or e-mail, and the dissemination of information from one point to many, by such means as newspapers, books, pamphlets, flyers, and posters, or by radio and television broadcasts and the World Wide Web.

This chapter explores the movement that flourished between 1839 and 1851 that limited the involvement of the federal government on the postal system and the telegraph network, which at the time provided the two principal forms of long-distance communication: mail delivery and telegraphy. It highlights certain features of this regulatory regime to provide better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of what is called communications deregulation, or what contemporaries called private enterprise.

This chapter first discusses how, in The Pickwick Papers, Dickens draws upon the effect on a community of being linked together temporally by a public transport system. It then turns to how Pickwick’s structuring as a series of rides around an accelerated public stage-coaching system reveals how the revolution in public transport transformed space so that it too became shared in a new way. It addresses the question of what, if anything, does a revolution in passenger transportation have to do with the serialization of novels. Finally, it considers what Pickwick says about letters, the postal system, and epistolary form.

This chapter discusses the medium—the mode of communication a group uses to communicate and organize. It reviews the advent of the printing press, the post office, the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad, the telephone, the radio, and the television, revealing that with the emergence of each of these innovations, a mass movement or movements rose up in their wake. Communications technology, in the form of the steam printing press, combined with the reach of the postal system, helped spur abolitionist efforts. Indeed, just as the abolitionist movement was gaining strength, this new technology helped fuel the advocacy of the movement and strengthen its power and reach. The chapter explores this connection between communications technology and social movements in U.S. history, from the events leading up to the American Revolution through the successes of the civil rights movement.

The British left behind a modern infrastructure as the most tangible legacy of its colonial rule in South Asia. This legacy included ports, railways, canal irrigation, sanitation and medical care, the telegraph, universities, the courts of law, information-gathering systems, a postal system, and scientific research laboratories. In nineteenth-century India, the state focused its productive investment mainly on irrigation, railways, roads, and the telegraph. This chapter focuses on the major fields of infrastructure growth in India, beginning with a brief consideration of the general motivation behind these efforts. Government spending on infrastructure was uneven, in part due to the limited financial capacity of the state.

This chapter surveys how literacies were talked about and used between 1860 and 1930. Over this period, the idea of literacy was becoming more reified as a social ideal that represented progress, advancement, and optimism, particularly for those invested in the idea of a modern Egypt: nationalists, women activists, and bureaucrats, as well as Coptic and Muslim reformers. Those already educated were encouraged to participate in ever more beneficial forms of literacy, and the visibility of literacies—in life, print, and politics—made it central to what it meant to be engaged in the social issues of the day. Meanwhile, practices of literacies were diversifying and reaching more people across the educational spectrum, particularly through the press and the postal system. Egyptians who were not “officially” literate were able to engage in communal practices of reading aloud, letter writing, and the like, to a quantitatively and qualitatively new extent.

This chapter presents the methodology of the book's study. For the purpose of this study, Latin American countries were selected because of their common historical origins and culture and their comparable levels of development. The intent was to see if differences existed between a sample of countries that commonly receive comparable scores in cross-national indices of “institutional quality.” The countries included in the study are Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. Moreover, the study selected institutions that are emblematic of economic, technical, and social functions deemed fundamental for the proper organization and advancement of most nations. These include stock exchanges, tax authorities, public health services, postal systems, and civil aviation authorities.

Describing the official postal system established by emperor Maximilian I in 1490, Chapter Two argues that in the earliest decades of the imperial postal system, the representation of messengers called attention to the shifting loci of authority and to the means and efficacies by which art could serve as a bearer of overt and furtive messages. This chapter explores the notion of transit through the iconography of the horse in prints that circulated around northern Europe.

Chapter One first elaborates the significance of letters to constitute racial capitalism and dominant forms of nation, state, and empire on both sides of the East Asian and North American Pacific. As battles over international infrastructures of letter conveyance and circulation mediated global wars to secure territorial domination, the practice of letter writing itself also played a central role in these struggles: serving as the standard medium of both government and business administration throughout the modernizing world as well as the primary mode of training modern subjectivity and proper citizenship. In this context, and amidst the globalization of colonial and civil warfare, this chapter examines how engagements with paper, print, and postal technologies thus significantly shaped forms of both U.S. white supremacist and incipient Chinese nationalisms as well as evolving forms of Chinese and U.S. imperialisms in this period.

Colonists had used information since their arrival in North America. This chapter argues that they established a legacy of literacy and reading, supported by educational systems and establishment of libraries. In the process they created a massive national information network. It was also supported by actions taken by the national government, from constitutional articles to the establishment of the postal service and construction of roads and canals. The chapter discusses the affordability of information and the influence of cities in making information sharing possible. As a result of these combination of developments in colonial life, an information ecosystem emerged that made it possible for people to rely on increasing amounts of information in support of their activities. These included the work, political and religious lives, education, hobbies, and leisure activities. In combination, they set a pattern for how Americans used information over many centuries.

This chapter discusses the role of big government in communications. It describes three governmental institutions that have been especially consequential: the postal system, the regulatory agency, and the Internet. The postal system and the Internet are federal institutions; regulatory agencies, in contrast, have derived their authority not only from the federal government but also from the states. Each of these institutions had its greatest influence in a different century: the postal system in the 1800s; the regulatory agency in the 1900s; the Internet today.

The introduction provides an overview of the history of the Soviet labor camp system, describes the way the Gulag postal and censorship systems operated, and offers extensive information about Formakov’s biography. It details Formakov’s career as a provincial writer and journalist and discusses the history of Dvinsk/Daugavpils, the city in which he lived and worked before his 1940 arrest and a center of Old Believer culture. It also places the story of Formakov’s arrest and imprisonment in the larger context of Latvian history, noting the purge that took place immediately after the Soviet invasion of Latvia in 1940, the horrors of the Nazi occupation, and the waves of arrests that occurred after the Soviet Union reoccupied the area in 1944. A final section considers Formakov’s relationship with Solzhenitsyn. Formakov served as one of the witnesses who provided testimony about the labor camp system for Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.

This chapter explores the importance of letter-writing in Jane Austen’s life. It tries to assess the claim that Jane Austen must have written about 3,000 letters, and it does so with the help of methods from corpus linguistics (searching for words that refer to letters or to the writing process). Jane Austen and Cassandra exchanged letters whenever either was away, which formed an important means for staying in touch and exchanging news. The largest number of letters were written and received—as far as we can tell—during the year 1813, and they were mostly exchanged between relatives, friends and acquaintances. The letters show all aspects of the letter-writing process: the materials used, the postal system (official and unofficial). Letter-writing was a social activity: letters were read by others but also sometimes written jointly. Receiving a letter was usually the highlight of the day.

As savants began to view the publications of scientific societies and academies as a subset of a larger class of scientific journals, some began laboring to define the bounds of what was fast becoming a significant institution of elite science in its own right. Even as many specialized journals were founded, the venues in which new discoveries were rendered public remained remarkably diffuse. Faced with such diversity, some individuals launched catalogues designed in part to encompass the limits of legitimate discovery. Some of the earliest efforts in this direction occurred in fields of natural history but the most dramatic example was the Catalogue of Scientific Papers, a massive canonization project launched by the Royal Society of London in the late 1850s. Designed to include all original scientific papers that had been published during the nineteenth century, the Catalogue not only projected back in time a rigid definition of the scientific paper that required authorship, originality, and seriality, but by highlighting authorship it provided a means of appraising a life in science through an enumerated list of scientific papers.

When scholars investigate the spreading of news, print plays a dominant role and if manuscript comes into play at all it is usually in the form of the newsletter. Letters usually take a back seat. This begs the question, what kind of news did people send by the post and what kind of ties did it create between centre and locality? This chapter uses the letters sent to Theophilus Hastings, the 7th Earl of Huntingdon, to answer this question. An inspection of these letters reveals two kinds of news correspondents and two kinds of news that circulated through letters. Hastings received his news from official correspondents, individuals from whom he solicited news and only news, and from family dependants during their travels. However, this conduit for news worked both ways. News from the locality mattered as much as ‘Citie News’. When Hastings travelled to London dependants sent him ‘Countrie News’ or ‘home news’. This type of news is often left unexamined. However, it was just as important for Hastings to be up to date on the politics of the parish as it was for him to know the politics of the nation.