Kontextmaschine

5th January 2016

Question reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 61 notes

3dspacejesus asked: Are there any Amhist topics you've been meaning to write effortposts on, which just haven't come together for some reason or another?

kontextmaschine:

I’ve mentioned I’ve wanted to write about historical travel/communication routes:
Roads - the organic growth of local roads, the tendency to form road districts, corvee labor as a support mechanism, the iffy history of medium-distance private roads (profitable mostly in support of land development w/ poor long-term income streams); above all the historical novelty of roads as city-to-city transit modes, previously a thing of railroads or
Coastal and Inland Shipping - historically the fastest, most efficient method of transit; the significance of the Appalachians and the East Coast’s lack of lengthy rivers; the way command of New Orleans (and thus the Mississippi system) and the St. Lawrence (and thus the Great Lakes) played into trade empire strategies and how that interacted with US settler colonialism (, how this experience played into the Chinese Exclusion Act as a defense of the American Pacific presence focused on the trade city of San Francisco); the way Philadelphia came to early prominence due to the Delaware Water Gap offering a rare route to the interior and how New York stole her thunder with the Erie Canal offering an alternate route to the Great Lakes, with a potential portage to the Mississippi system at a site we now call “Chicago”
The Post Office - overlapping a lot with the above two on modalities; how post-carrying contracts promoted, structured, and regulated American shipping and railroads before the dawn of the modern regulatory state; how the era where the federal government was “just the Army & Post Office” actually meant a lot of recognizably contemporary programs got shoehorned in (compare the Army Corps of Engineers, Lewis & Clark Expedition, various imperial overseas administrations). The Post Office as a domestic spy and countersubversive agency - against abolitionists, Confederates, anarchists, antinatalist feminist race-suiciders. The Post Office as the major source of federal patronage, and the reason the same parties operate at federal and local levels where issues and pressures are otherwise perpendicular

ALSO:

Roads - the Good Roads Movement; auto clubs and the stitching-together of long distance routes; Route 66; the Eisenhower Interstate System; that between internal combustion and dynamite and the rediscovery of concrete and then tarmac America literally exploded its way to a modern marvel nearly as impressive as what the Romans did millennia ago by growing wheat and yelling

The Post Office - Rural Free Delivery, Parcel Post, catalog shopping, second- and fourth-class Mail subsidies: Sears as the original Amazon, the fucking *mail* as the original internet. Maybe some pneumatic tube shit as comic relief.