Business Historians on the U.S. Postal Service

Over at Publick Occurrences, the Common-Place blog, Joseph M. Adelman has written the first two in what he promises will be a series of posts on the history and current problems of the U.S. Postal Service. The first comments on “The Decline and Fall of the U.S. Postal Service,” and the second considers “The Post Office as a State-Business Hybrid.”
   Adelman (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 2010) is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where he is working on a book project tentatively titled “Revolutionary Networks: The Business of Printing and the Production of American Politics, 1763-1789,” a systematic study of the communications infrastructure that framed political debate during the American Revolution. From February to July 2012, he will be an NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.
  His article, “‘A Constitutional Conveyance of Intelligence, Public and Private’: The Post Office, the Business of Printing, and the American Revolution,” which appears in Enterprise & Society 11, no. 4 (2010), has been awarded the 2011 Rita Lloyd Moroney Junior Prize for Scholarship in Postal History from the U.S. Postal Service.
   In his initial post office-related blog post, Adelman provides a useful link to the text of a study that Richard R. John did  for the Postal Regulatory Commission in 2008, History of Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly.