Rachel Midura, "Spies in the Post Office"

The history of postal service is also a history of intelligence-gathering in state-building. A postal service that could ensure safe and secure intelligence was key, but so too was its extension of state surveillance into the budding public sphere. Far from impartial actors, postmasters and postmistresses were active combatants in early modern information wars.

Rachel Midura is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European and Digital History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She finished her PhD in early modern European history in 2020 at Stanford University, where she was also a senior graduate research fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.  Her first book, Princes of the Post: Power, Publicity, and Europe’s Postal Revolution (1500-1700) tells a new history of communications in early modern Europe. Her work has most recently appeared in the Journal of Social History (2021) and the edited volume Print and Power (2021).

Follow Rachel on Twitter: @rcmidura

Follow Rachel on Mastodon: @rmidura@mastodon.world

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