More Than Words: Readings in Transport, Communication and the History of Postal Communication (review)

'Communication,' writes John Willis, 'is the lifeblood of our species. It is the first thing we do upon our entry into this world and may very well be the last . . . [A]s historians, we ignore it at our empirical peril' (14). The principal theme of the twenty-one essays in this book is postal communication and writing, mostly in Canada, but also in the United States and France, and written communication between Europe and North America.

There are exceptions. Duncan Stacey uses new sources to re-examine the Vancouver Post Office strike of 1938; the only connection to postal communication is that the strikers, who were not post office workers, occupied the Vancouver Post Office. The workers and RCMP despised each other, provoking violence; the City Police and workers had some mutual sympathy. In a theoretically informed essay, Mary Vipond finds that the CBC's radio coverage of the 1939 royal tour helped to establish the national and international reputation of the corporation.

Some essays focus on technology. Bianca Gendreau investigates a facet of Hudson's Bay Company activity that has received limited attention from fur-trade historians: the shipment of high-quality goose (or swan) quills, in quantities ranging from an average of 53,600 annually in the 1770s to over 90,000 annually in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Marianne Babal explores the movement of mail by steamship to and from 'Gold-Rush California,' 1848–58, helping to reduce Californians' sense of isolation prior to establishment of land-based stage-coach and pony express services. Krista Cooke looks at the changing technology of processing mail from 1867 to the 1960s, from dependence upon workers at every stage, to mechanized processing and automation required to handle the increasing volumes of mail.

New insights into patterns of communication in the fishery of the sixteenth century are offered by Brad Loewen. Using archival sources in France, Jean-Pierre Chrestien finds insights into life on Îsle Scaterie (near Louisbourg) and the nearby fishery, between 1714 and 1748. Bernard Allaire shows how patterns of handling official mail in France to avoid foreign espionage on the one hand, and conflict between institutional interests on the other, were reflected in the colonies in the eighteenth century. Nicole Castéran addresses the coded correspondence of the French during the Seven Years War.

Several articles report on collections of writings. Sheila McIntyre finds that the 1676 copybook of a twelve-year-old Massachusetts boy demonstrates the ways that gentility was inculcated along with learning to write. Yves Frenette and Gabriele Scardellato study the extensive correspondence of Christian Bennedsen, a Danish immigrant to Canada, between 1951 and 1998. The private life of Herman Witsius Ryland, an English civil servant and politician in Lower Canada from 1794 to 1838, is examined by Lorraine Gadoury. The famous literary figure Abbé Casgrain carried on a rather intimate and carefully coded correspondence with Mrs Kate E. Godley, wife of Lord Monck's secretary; Manon Brunet suggests that this relationship 'could have affected the course of Canadian history,' but the article shows that it did not. Pierre Gilibert came from France to settle east of Stettler, AB, in 1905; his eight surviving letters, from 1905, 1906, and 1912, tell of the process of immigrating, locating land, and getting settled. The collection is modest, and so are the conclusions of Marguerite Sauriol. Susanne Knoblauch uses the letters (1863–7) of her great-great uncle Carl Eduard Knoblauch to investigate comparatively his, and her own, immigrant experiences in the United States. Liz Turcotte reports on the meaning of mail for soldiers and their families during the First and Second World Wars; Jean Martin studies patterns of mail distribution for Canadian forces overseas between 1945 and 1975.

Nancy Pope movingly shows how the US National Postal Museum has commemorated the tragedy of 11 September 2001, and Richard Kielbowicz studies the shifting boundaries between services...