| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Wayne E. Fuller. Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 264. $39.95.

In nineteenth-century America, the United States Postal Service was the principal purveyor of the nation's culture. Post riders, stagecoaches, steamboats, and then trains followed the nation's moving population across the continent. Nineteenth-century postal innovations such as stamps and envelopes, free delivery, special delivery, money orders, registered letters, and parcel service combined with cheap postage to help publishers disseminate all sorts of information on a scale unimaginable in the eighteenth century. By 1900, for instance, the postal service annually distributed more than two million pieces of mail weighing more than 450 million pounds. No arm of the federal government was more directly involved in the daily lives of Americans than the postal system. The nineteenth-century communication revolution spawned by the rapidly developing and innovative postal system helped bring both moral and immoral products of popular culture into Americans' homes. Since Congress controlled the postal system, the regulation of the mails was directly related to American politics. Various groups, including newspaper and magazine publishers, free-love advocates, freethinkers, and especially evangelical Protestants intent on preserving America as a "Christian nation," pressured Congress to change postal rules and regulations to their own liking. In this book, Wayne E. Fuller explores the intersection of new publishing technologies, postal service innovations, American politics, and Protestant aspirations to regulate the nation's morality.

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