Once lauded as the “greatest business organization in the world,” the United States Post Office has seemed over the past half century to be in constant crisis and decline. In the 1960s, the failure of outdated technology and a series of wildcat strikes crippled what was then the Post Office Department. In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) found itself beset by a shift to electronic forms of communication plus the human and public relations nightmare of employees “going postal.” And in the past ten years, of course, the USPS has been mired in debt, largely attributable to the 2006 reform act that required it to prefund its pension plan for the next seventy-five years. Most forecasters and business-minded reformers predict that the postal system will be privatized within a decade, following the examples overseas of the Royal Mail, Deutsche Post, and others.

As Winifred Gallagher argues in her engaging new synthetic history of the U.S. Post Office, How the Post Office Created America, such a path would mark a sharp departure for the postal system. The Post Office in her telling was the key institution for shaping not only communications in the United States but also emerging ideas about American identity and culture. Over sixteen chapters, Gallagher traces the path of postal service in the United States from its colonial origins in New England to the twenty-first century. She offers a narrative that emphasizes the centrality of the Post Office as a means of communications through much of American history, focusing specifically on its central challenge as a government agency that sometimes looks and sounds like a business.

The heart of the book focuses on the triumphant era of the long nineteenth century, from the Post Office Act of 1792 to Progressive Era reforms such as postal banking and rural free delivery. Building on the work of Richard John and other scholars, Gallagher illuminates the foundational nature of the post in creating a vast and pervasive national communications network. Through the nineteenth century, the Post Office dramatically expanded its reach not just in geographic terms but also in the breadth of its services. By the end of the century, the Post Office had begun to deliver mail to homes in both cities and rural areas, operated a system for sending money through the mail, and opened a postal banking system. In addition, the Post Office collaborated with American corporations to facilitate the transportation of mail, from working with stagecoach operators in early decades to innovating the Railway Mail Service.

For Gallagher, the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century marked a clear decline from the “golden age” of postal service in the United States. After World War I, she argues, the view that the Post Office should act as a profit-seeking business gained precedence in Congress and the White House among both major parties. Rather than see the post as “an almost open-ended public service,” Gallagher suggests that government and postal officials instead “grew preoccupied with increasing its revenue and reducing its deficits.” The postal system helped pioneer aviation, for example, but the Air Mail Service was structured to foster the growth of commercial airlines. After World War II, the focus on the short-term balance sheet led inexorably to a decaying infrastructure, with outdated technology ill-suited to increasing volumes of mail and a long-distance transportation system engineered for rail, just as it declined precipitously in favor of cars and trucks. The bipartisan 1970 reform act tried to solve the problem by turning the Post Office into an independent government-owned corporation. The result, Gallagher quips, was a “government-business jackalope” that satisfied no one.

Within the central narrative of the book, Gallagher skillfully weaves a range of other information about the Post Office. Each chapter features profiles of major or intriguing figures, including not only postmasters general such as Amos Kendall, James Farley, and Arthur Summerfield, but also lesser-known postal figures such as Mary Katherine Goddard, Lysander Spooner, and even Owney the dog (now taxidermied and on display at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.). She pays careful attention for each period in American history to the role of the Post Office in advancing (or, at some moments, not) the cause of equality and opportunity for women and African Americans, two groups who found the Post Office a more hospitable employer than most other industries prior to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. For the more statistically minded reader, she notes throughout basic figures about the volume of mail, the number of post offices, and other points of comparison, without ever compromising her narrative. In her approach to these issues, Gallagher deftly manages the difficult task of writing an engrossing narrative for a popular audience while integrating the best of academic scholarship on the postal system, including work by Richard John, David Henkin, Wayne Fuller, and Dorothy Fowler. Finally, it is noteworthy that she further displays a keen sense of her audience through her inclusion of philately and stamp production in her narrative, with a nod to a significant reason for public interest in the Post Office.

How the Post Office Created America strikes a nostalgic tone about the role that the Post Office once had in American life. Gallagher notes in the introduction, for instance, that from its earliest days “the post has responded to the nation's changing needs—indeed, the institution's advances had often helped precipitate them—but crises and budget-driven policy decisions have gradually, almost imperceptibly, erased America's collective memory of what this dynamic institution has been and vision of what it could be” (pp. 4–5). As Gallagher points out in the introduction and afterword, the Post Office has long lacked an overarching narrative history, the efforts of a few historians notwithstanding. How the Post Office Created America is therefore a welcome addition to our understanding of the importance of the postal system and mail in American life.