These days, what we find in the mailbox tends to fall into one of two categories: junk mail or quaint hand-written reminders of times past.
While the mail may now vacillate between irritating or antiquated, for more than two hundred years the U.S. Post Office played a central role in American life. It was not only the institution that allowed us to communicate with each other across state lines and beyond, but it played a vital part in our country’s political organization and hierarchies.
Fifty years ago this week, communications went global. July 12, 1962 the Telstar 1 satellite from AT&T became the first commercial spacecraft to beam television images from the United States to Europe.
From: Backstory with the American History Guys: In the early days of our nation, July Fourth wasn’t an official holiday at all. In fact, it wasn’t until 1938 that it became a paid day-off. So how did the Fourth become the holiest day on our secular calendar?
Historian Pauline Maier offers some answers, and explains how radically the meaning of the Declaration has changed since 1776. James Heintze chronicles early Independence Day Bacchanalia. And historian David Blight reflects on Frederick Douglass’ arresting 1852 Independence Day speech.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — When officials from the United States arrived in newly acquired Louisiana in 1804 to consider the prospects of the area for statehood, they found a bewildering landscape that could not have been more different from the New England countryside that gave birth to the nation just a few decades earlier.
The federal group found a population made up almost entirely of French-speakers, a third of whom were free people of color.
The delegation was perplexed, according to Connie Zeanah Atkinson, professor of U.S. history at the University of New Orleans.
John Batson was General Manager of WWNO throughout a period that saw numerous achievements, including improved transmission across the region, acquisition of KTLN to serve the Houma - Thibodeaux area better, and locally-produced programs, like Crescent City. Before retiring, John wrote this history of the station.
