For the next 87 years, it remained The Republic of Liberia, formerly a colony of the American Colonization Society, declares its independence. Under pressure from Britain, the United States hesitantly accepted Liberian sovereignty, making the West African nation the first democratic republic in African history.
It was the first general election held in Britain in more than a decade. The same day, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. For as popular as it was during much of the first half of the 20th century, couples dancing seemed poised to go by the wayside of American popular culture by the early s.
That is, until the arrival of a dance called the Hustle along with a 1 song by the same name. On July On July 24, Tokyo decided to strengthen its position in terms of its invasion of China by moving through Southeast Asia. Raised in a middle-class English family, Michael Philip Jagger attended the London School of Economics but left without graduating in order to pursue On July 26, , a swarm of grasshoppers descends on crops throughout the American heartland, devastating millions of acres.
Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, already in the midst of a bad drought, suffered tremendously from this disaster. Since the very beginning of Clerks at work in a London post office circa Penny Black stamp. The Easter Rising. Sign up for our newsletter Enter your email address below to get the latest news and exclusive content from The History Press delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up. Share this page. The Postal Service.
England's Mail Buy. Royal Mail Coaches Buy. The Baghdad Air Mail Buy. Caribbean Folk Tales Buy. The Least of These Buy. Between and , the number of post offices increased from just 75 to 24, Carriers initially transported the mail by foot and on horseback, then moving to stagecoaches, rail, cars and trucks — and ultimately to airplanes. Those early days of mail delivery resulted in huge improvements to the country's system of roads. Local governments also extended and improved their existing highways to help the new mail service called rural free delivery RFD.
The most celebrated form of mail delivery was the Pony Express. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. This work has not always been well-rewarded. Letter carriers began to unionize in the s, almost as soon as home delivery began, and fought for better pay and work conditions. But even a hundred years later, some letter carriers were still paid so little that they lived off food stamps and welfare.
In , a presidential commission concluded that mail service would be improved if it were run as a business, a proposal that postal unions opposed. Things hit a breaking point in , when New York City carriers launched a strike that spread across the nation. The post-strike negotiations changed the face of the institution yet again. In , an act of Congress turned the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service, a government-owned company expected to generate enough revenue to pay for itself.
For nearly two centuries, taxpayers had funded the Post Office to help build a nation. Now, the nation was deemed built. For decades since then, the new U. Postal Service worked just fine, and by the s, the agency was steadily turning a profit. All that came to a screeching halt with the arrival of email at the end of the 20 th century. First-class and marketing mail is dwindling— dropping by 34 percent since Because it has a legal obligation to visit every household six days a week, the Postal Service can offer cheap rates to private carriers like Amazon and FedEx, bringing deliveries on the last step of the journey to our doorsteps.
Though President Donald Trump has complained that the Postal Service is losing money in the deal, the agency itself has stated that its costs are covered. Details of the deal are not public, but the agency is required by law to ensure such deals are profitable. An independent body, the Postal Regulatory Commission, oversees these deals.
Lately, though, even this revenue has begun to plateau. The law also included an unusual requirement, instructing the agency to pay advance for future employee retirement benefits. Then came the Great Recession that hit in December It has not turned a profit since. In , the Postal Service began to default on those retirement benefit payments —its only option, it says, if it wants to keep paying its suppliers and employees.
Now, with mail volume plummeting further due to the coronavirus, there are concerns that within months, the Postal Service will lack the funds it needs to continue full operation. Stakeholders and pundits are debating what comes next.
The Postal Service has examined the potential of turning rural post offices into broadband hubs that would reach households through existing telephone lines. Politicians have talked about having the Postal Service return to banking , a service it provided for half of the last century, to reach remote communities not served by commercial financial institutions.
But any of these changes would require overturning the law. A task force convened by President Trump in suggested that instead of moving into new sectors, the Postal Service should focus on its essential tasks as shipping pharmaceutical shipments, personal letters, bills, government communications, and packages from one individual to another.
These, the commission recommended, would be protected from competition and kept cheap. For everything else—like shipping packages for online retailers—the task force suggested removing price caps and charging higher prices based on the market. Some advocates for privatization want to go even further and eliminate federal postal service entirely, which they see as an untaxed business distorting the marketplace.
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