People of Agency

People of Agency Special Episode: Show Notes Special Episode: Your Vote Is In The Mail Explicit: No Summary On March 23rd, 2026, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee,  a case that could throw out nearly a million legally cast ballots before the 2026 midterms. The same day, the president stood in Memphis and called mail-in voting "cheating." Public records sh...

On March 17th, 2026, two things happened simultaneously: the Postmaster General told Congress the U.S. Postal Service will run out of money in less than twelve months, and Amazon, USPS's largest customer,  announced it's walking away. This isn't a crisis that arrived suddenly. It's the bottom of a fifty-year fall, engineered by the same corporations and legislators who are now presenting privatiza...

Season 1 told the 250-year history of the U.S. Postal Service, but we weren't really talking about mail. We were talking about how ordinary people build public institutions, and how power tries to take them back. Season 2 is about journalism. The free press and the postal service grew up together. In 1792, the Post Office Act subsidized newspaper delivery at rates way below cost. Not because it wa...

In August 2020, three months before a presidential election, during a pandemic, postal workers watch perfectly working mail sorting machines being dismantled, some cut with blowtorches, some thrown in dumpsters. 711 post office machines removed in a few months (double normal rate), 10% of national sorting capacity gone. When union leaders ask why, management says they're "no longer needed" while m...

In December 30, 2025 a Danish postal worker delivers the last letter Denmark will ever send. After 401 years, postal service ends entirely. The 1,000 iconic red mailboxes get auctioned off, nostalgic Danes crash the website buying them as souvenirs. Starting January 1, 2026, mailing a letter costs $4.55 with no street mailboxes, only kiosks run by a private newspaper company. Denmark spent 25 year...

(Content warning: Episode contains discussion of gun violence, workplace violence and toxic work environments) Summary Post Office Postmaster General William Henderson proposes giving every American a free government email address with the suffix ".us", with privacy protections like sealed mail, where the government can't read your correspondence without a warrant. Congress and customers reject it...

January 4, 1982. Post Office Postmaster General William Bolger sends the first official E-COM message, Electronic Computer-Originated Mail, a brilliant hybrid system where businesses transmit messages electronically to the Post Office, which prints and delivers them. The concept could have made the Post Office your internet provider. Instead, AT&T used the Postal Rate Commission to kill it. Corpor...

In 1970 at the Hotel Statler, Manhattan 2,600 postal workers are packed into a ballroom at 6 PM to vote on something incredibly illegal: striking against the federal government. Twenty percent have second jobs outside the Post Office. 16% qualify for food stamps. These are full-time federal employees, government workers, who cannot afford to live on what the government pays them. You don't want to...

December 1966 in Chicago's main post office. Ten million pieces of mail sit backlogged, and officials are reportedly discussing whether to just burn it all. The problem? The postal system that worked for a century was collapsing under its own success. Railway Mail Service clerks had to memorize up to 30,000 addresses, knowledge that took years to build and lived entirely in workers' heads. When so...

Chipping away at Trust  Two stories just broke that show exactly how you destroy the most trusted institution in America, a classic corporate capture. Amazon's $6 billion contract with the Post Office (USPS) expires in October 2026, and after nearly a year of negotiations, there's no deal, just as Amazon finishes building a $4 billion rural delivery network on routes they learned while relying on...

December 1930 in the Bronx. Thousands of people stand outside the collapsed Bank of United States, their life savings vanished overnight. But a few blocks north at the post office, there's a different kind of line: quiet, orderly people depositing what's left into the Postal Savings System, backed by the federal government and guaranteed not to disappear. Between 1930 and 1933, as 9,000 banks fail...

Aileen, Maia and special guest Grant introduce Well, I Laughed (Maia’s other podcast *gasp*). Tune in for a dive into the history of America’s political parties and how that relates to our current federal landscape.    From the Well, I Laughed Podcast:  Has American politics always been so divided? Our current political system seems broken beyond repair, but where did it all start? This week Grant...

"Okay, I get the history is interesting, but do we really need the Post Office anymore?" After their first episodes of postal history dropped, Aileen and Maia kept hearing this question. So they moved this episode up to address it head-on because this isn't about nostalgia, it's about showing what we'd actually lose if we let the corporate capture of USPS continue. They reveal the manufactured fin...

Everyone thinks 1918 was slow. Horse-and-buggy America, right? Wrong. The Post Office had built one of the most advanced communication networks on the planet, but it still took over a week to get mail coast-to-coast. So they looked at thousands of surplus WWI planes sitting idle and thought: what if we use flying death traps to move the mail? This chapter of postal history and civic history is act...

What if the most revolutionary force in American history wasn't a politician or an army, but post office mail carriers bringing letters to farmhouse doors? At the turn of the 20th century, rural Americans lived in profound isolation, cut off from news, markets, and opportunities that city dwellers took for granted. Predatory merchants and railroad companies exploited this information gap, charging...

July 2, 1881. President James Garfield walks through a Washington train station. Charles Guiteau steps forward, raises a revolver, and fires twice. As Garfield falls, Guiteau shouts: "I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts! Arthur is president now!" In his mind, this isn't murder, it's a job application. Find out how this assassination changed civic history, government workers, the post office, and is a...

October 6, 1866. Three men board a slow-moving train in Seymour, Indiana. They beat a messenger unconscious, steal $16,000, and throw a 300-pound safe off a moving train. It's the first peacetime train robbery in American history, and it accidentally invents federal law enforcement as we know it. Find out how this involves the post office, a corner of postal history, civic history and government w...

Winter 1895 in Cascade, Montana. A nearly sixty-year-old Black woman who was born enslaved leans into a blizzard, driving a U.S. Post Office wagon through drifts that have turned men around. Her name is Mary Fields, and she will become a postal history legend. But before we meet Stagecoach Mary, we need to understand the postal system she bent to her will. In Episode 2, Aileen and Maia trace how t...

What if the real glue holding America together isn't laws or leaders, but the mail and the post office? In the premiere episode of People of Agency, Aileen and Maia kick off their deep dive into U.S. Postal Service history by exploring its revolutionary origins. Before independence, before the Constitution, the Continental Congress established the Post Office, making mail history older than Americ...

The Post Office is older than the United States, and that's not a coincidence. From the American Revolution to Rural Free Delivery, the Post Office has been a silent, foundational institution that literally built the roads and airways of modern America.  Join Aileen Day and Maia Warner-Langenbahn as they dig up the receipts and reveal the untold, radical history of this essential public good. This...