January 12, 2023 Perhaps it’s fitting that the Postal Service, an organization that has touched every corner of American life, can trace its roots to the most quintessential American. Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s first postmaster general, was born 318 years ago on Jan. 17, 1706. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and…
USPS News Release – October 30, 2023 WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Postal Service is offering a new activity book to teach kids about postal history. A Kids’ History of the United States Postal Service is a colorful, 40-page booklet full of historic facts, photos and stories about the U.S. Mail and the people (and animals!) who…
July 27, 2023 The ZIP Code was launched 60 years ago this month as part of a program of improvements to increase postal delivery speed. At the time, Americans were already struggling to adapt to three-digit area codes for long-distance telephone calls, so promoting the five-digit ZIP (short for Zone Improvement Plan) Code was a…
June 21, 2023 Fifty years ago, the Postal Service moved its headquarters into its eighth and present-day home in the nation’s capital, at 475 L’Enfant Plaza SW in Washington, DC. In many ways, the move was symbolic: Two years prior, the federal government’s Cabinet-level arm known as the Post Office Department was reborn as the…
May 3, 2022 EPISODE SUMMARY This week, we’re joined by Alison Bazylinski, Assistant Curator at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, to talk about a symbol of public service, the Postal Service uniform! We’ll learn more about the history of the uniform, how it’s changed over time to reflect societal trends, and more. EPISODE NOTES…
EPISODE SUMMARY On this episode of Mailin’ It, take a step back in time with USPS Historian Jenny Lynch to learn about the early days of the U.S. Postal Service. We’ll talk about the role posts played in the American Revolution, how these events shaped the founders’ ideas about the way the U.S. Postal Service…
July 13, 2021 When Musette Henley started working at the Chicago Post Office as a mail sorter in 1961, she and her co-workers had no say over their work schedules. “[We] had to check the board every day to see if you worked the next day. We would not know … what day we would…
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service marks its 50th anniversary as an independent agency today. On July 1, 1971, the U.S. Post Office Department became the U.S. Postal Service, a transformation made possible by the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. This law transformed the Post Office Department from a cabinet level agency to an independent…
