The Post Office Department (1792–1971) was the name of the United States Postal Service prior to it being a Cabinet department, and during the time that it was at cabinet-level, officially from 1872 to 1971. It was headed by the Postmaster General.
The Postal Service Act signed by President George Washington on February 20, 1792, established the Department. Postmaster General John McLean was the first to call it the Post Office Department rather than just the "Post Office." The organization received a boost in prestige when President Andrew Jackson invited his Postmaster General, William T. Barry, to sit as a member of the Cabinet in 1829. The Post Office Act of 1872 (17 Stat. 283) elevated the Post Office Department to Cabinet status.
During the Civil War (1861–65), postal services in the Confederacy were provided by the CSA Post Office Department, headed by Postmaster General John Henninger Reagan.
The Postal Reorganization Act was signed by President Richard Nixon on August 12, 1970. It replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with the independent Postal Service on July 1, 1971.
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“You are, I am sure, aware that genuine popular support in the United States is required to carry out any Government policy, foreign or domestic. The American people make up their own minds and no governmental action can change it.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet this is his very being.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)
“I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Along the garden-wall the bees
With hairy bellies pass between
The staminate and pistillate,
Blest office of the epicene.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“I believe in women; and in their right to their own best possibilities in every department of life. I believe that the methods of dress practiced among women are a marked hindrance to the realization of these possibilities, and should be scorned or persuaded out of society.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)