All right, Nick, I got a good one for you.

We are gazing at North America from the stratosphere, okay?

You with me? Music swells, and suddenly we zoom in on a newspaper in front of a suburban house.

The homeowner steps out to pick it up, on her way to the mailbox.

But wait, who's that coming down the street?

It's her mail carrier coming to hand off some letters to her in person, in the front yard of her house.

I feel like you're pitching me the least dramatic movie that anyone has ever seen.

It might seem that way at first, but it is dramatic.

This is actually from a video that the Postal Service produced to show how it works.

Because when you really stop to think about it,

a remarkable confluence of events had to occur for that postal worker to be handing off a bunch of mail from various parts of the country, maybe even the world, to that lady in front of her very own house.

It is a huge operation. And by the way, it's a government operation. When someone sends a letter, it enters a system already at work that most people never get to see.

I was interested in how does this government agency deal with millions of letters and parcels every day

and get them to the right person, you know, across a vast network?

This is Allison Marsh.

And I'm a history professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South

Carolina.

And I was a former curator at the National Postal Museum.

The United States Postal Service is getting a lot of attention lately for being in financial

jeopardy and tessling with a president who thinks that it should pull itself up by its own bootstraps.

In order to understand how the USPS got to this point and to this kind of a relationship with the government,

I needed to understand how and why this institution came to be, how it's even possible that there is a service that can and will deliver objects to every home in this country.

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