"The History of the Post Office, from Its Establishment Down to 1836" by Herbert Joyce The Postal Service is one of the most essential branches of the government for everyday citizens around the world. However, its journey to evolve into its current form has been a long one. In this book, Joyce aims to educate readers on how the mail delivery service came to be, the steps it took to become more efficient and reliable, and what the future might have held for people in the 1800s.
An examination of how post-9/11 security concerns have transformed the public view and governance of infrastructure. After September 11, 2001, infrastructures—the mundane systems that undergird much of modern life—were suddenly considered “soft targets” that required immediate security enhancements. Infrastructure protection quickly became the multibillion dollar core of a new and expansive homeland security mission. In this book, Ryan Ellis examines how the long shadow of post-9/11 security concerns have remade and reordered infrastructure, arguing that it has been a stunning transformation. Ellis describes the way workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats, and others used the threat of terrorism as a political resource, taking the opportunity not only to address security vulnerabilities but also to reassert a degree of public control over infrastructure. Nearly two decades after September 11, the threat of terrorism remains etched into the inner workings of infrastructures through new laws, regulations, technologies, and practices. Ellis maps these changes through an examination of three U.S. infrastructures: the postal system, the freight rail network, and the electric power grid. He describes, for example, how debates about protecting the mail from anthrax and other biological hazards spiraled into larger arguments over worker rights, the power of large-volume mailers, and the fortunes of old media in a new media world; how environmental activists leveraged post-9/11 security fears over shipments of hazardous materials to take on the rail industry and the chemical lobby; and how otherwise marginal federal regulators parlayed new mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric power industry into a robust system of accountability.
News Networks in Early Modern Europe attempts to redraw the history of European news communication in the 16th and 17th centuries. News is defined partly by movement and circulation, yet histories of news have been written overwhelmingly within national contexts. This volume of essays explores the notion that early modern European news, in all its manifestations – manuscript, print, and oral – is fundamentally transnational. These 37 essays investigate the language, infrastructure, and circulation of news across Europe. They range from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas, focussing on the mechanisms of transmission, the organisation of networks, the spread of forms and modes of news communication, and the effects of their translation into new locales and languages.
Dr Munter studies the growth and changing nature of the Irish periodical press from the time of the Protestant Ascendancy under William III to 1760, when provincial papers began to flourish outside Dublin. This was the period when newspapers were produced very largely in Dublin, mostly for local circulation among the English-speaking Protestant upper class. Dr Munter first sets the production of newspapers within the general history of Irish printing and bookselling, and the organisation of the trade. He then examines particular aspects of Irish newspaper history, presenting evidence about the importation of paper and the growth of local manufacture; the development of advertising and its importance as an element in the financial structure of the newspaper; evidence of the profitability of newspapers; circulation figures; the effect of the communications system on the supply and dissemination of news; the status of journalists and the development of the journalistic ethic; and analysis of the contents of the papers.
First published in 1996, and here issued with a new preface, this work describes the emergence of the first weekly news publications, the immediate precursors of the modern newspaper. Previous ed.: Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
