From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson and I'm Joanne Freeman.

Today we're going to be talking about a topic that has been in and out and in and out of the news recently.

But that for one reason or another is going to stay in the news and that is the US Postal Service.

It's been in the news clearly a lot because of the Postmaster General Lewis DeJoy, who has been doing a number of reforms and changes into the postal system that have been controversial, that in one way or another have been slowing the males.

That in one way or another are also for that very reason, potentially having something to do with the process of voting and particularly absentee ballots.

For that reason among many others, it has a lot to do with more than the male and that's part of what we're going to be talking about today is the many ways in which the US Postal system is about a lot more than simply the male that it really burrows pretty deeply into what the United States is.

And the funny part about preparing for this was just how much fun it was how many times when we thought about the United States Postal Service as it's called now that we had great stories or great memories of things we've found in historical

documents, which says a lot about why the United States Postal Service is so important and what role it has played in America.

As a matter of fact, the Postal Service has been a pretty central part of what makes the United States the United States going all the way back to the beginning of the Republic.

Because if you think about the fact that a Republic, unlike a monarchical form of government relies on public opinion and that the public is sovereign.

The only way that the public can act in that capacity is if they are informed about events that are going on around them and particularly about what the government is doing.

And for that reason, the Postal Service ends up having an extreme political importance as well as a national importance that the founding generation was very well aware of.

So first of all, this interest in having postal roots along the colonies starts even before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, right?

Well, right, because even before independence is declared when you're in that period when the hostilities are building in America is already starting to turn on royal officers of various sorts, you still have to have a postal service in action.

So even before independence is officially declared, Americans are wrestling with the Postal Service and how it's going to work.

And fittingly, isn't it Benjamin Franklin who goes ahead and establishes the first US postal route even before the Declaration of Independence, he works for the British Crown as I recall.

And just so you know, I sound really good, don't I?

I am I am dredging this up from the fact I lived in a town as a kid that had one of the markers on what we then knew as the King's highway.

And we knew it as Franklin's marker. And so I'm really hoping that my second grade teacher was right when she said, Benjamin Franklin did this before the United States was the United States.

Wow. And I am going to point out here that there's a historical marker that did a thing, a concrete thing for little Heather before historian person and it has stayed with you.

Just as a historian, I want to give it a historical marker. It's it's moment of glory. Well, and worse, I dragged my nephew to it not 10 years ago. And somebody has put it inside a wall.

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