David Henkin, Assistant Professor of History, has received a Townsend Fellowship for Mail Call: Postal Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Professor Henkin’s study takes up the practices of writing, reading, sending, and expecting mail in the mid-nineteenth century, considering from a historical perspective the social and cultural impact of communications media in the period. The book will analyze several important and well-documented political and cultural conflicts connected to mail (for example, Sabbath mail service, abolitionist literature in the South, and the regulation of mailed pornography).