Mail

Should the USPS Honor the Sabbath, or Amazon?

by Rebecca Brenner Graham

A Pennsylvania postal worker's lawsuit claims religious discrimination because he was scheduled to deliver Amazon packages on Sunday. The history of Sunday mail service shows the case is about anxiety over power in society as much as religious obligation. 

The Past and Present of the U.S. Postal Service

Postal historian Philip Rubio joins The Takeaway to discuss new service standards that many fear will undermine the public standing of the Postal Service without meaningfully improving the agency's financial standing. 

Black Americans Worry Postal Changes Could Disrupt History Of Secure Jobs

Historian Philip Rubio comments on the historic importance of public employment, especially in the postal service, for Black Americans to avoid hiring discrimination and achieve economic security--gains threatened by plans to privatize the Post Office. 

The Postal Service Is the Most American Thing We’ve Got

by Ted Widmer

It would be difficult to think of a time when we have depended more on the United States Postal Service.

During Epidemics, Media (and now Social Media) have Always Helped People to Connect

by David Paul Nord

For several hundred years, people have used media — reading, writing and print — to maintain human contact and community in times of epidemic disease.

Philip Rubio: Austerity Saturdays from the Postal Service

Philip Rubio is an assistant professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University, and author of There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality (2010, University of North Carolina Press). It’s Saturday February 9th as I write this. Every postal worker knows by heart their first official day of work as their “anniversary date.” Not for sentimental reasons, but for purposes of seniority, retirement, and all the benefits thereof. It’s an important date. I retired early from the post office in Durham, North Carolina after 20 years to go to graduate school (30 years is standard retirement at the US Postal Service). But even though it’s been almost 13 years since I last punched off the clock, I still remember my anniversary date: February 9, 1980. Making $8.10 an hour to start: up from $2.95 an hour a decade, the result of over 200,000 postal workers staging an eight-day nationwide wildcat strike beginning March 18, 1970–the largest wildcat in U.S. history, leading to the 1971 transformation into the US Postal Service as a self-supporting independent government agency.

Postal Service honors Rosa Parks with new stamp

Hundreds of people, including some of Michigan's political elite, gathered Monday to celebrate the late Rosa Parks on what would have been her 100th birthday by unveiling a postage stamp in her honor steps from the Alabama bus on which she stared down segregation nearly 60 years ago.Parks, who died in 2005, became one of the enduring figures of the Civil Rights movement when she refused to cede her seat in the colored section of the Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white man after the whites-only section filled up. Her defiance and the ensuing black boycott of the city bus system helped the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. rise to national prominence...The Parks stamp is the second in a set of civil rights stamps being issued this year by the U.S. Postal Service.USPS launched the series Jan. 1 with the Emancipation Proclamation Forever Stamp, which was issued at The National Archives in Washington. In August, the series will culminate with the dedication of a stamp recognizing the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington...