United States
In the United States, colonial post roads developed as the primary method of transporting information across the original thirteen colonies. Post riders rode horses between towns on the road and milestones marked the distance between cities. Many of these milestones still exist on older highways such as the Boston Post Road. Before the advent of electronic communication, post roads were crucial in spreading news and knowledge across the colonies.
The Articles of Confederation authorized the national government to create post offices but not post roads. Adoption of the U.S. Constitution changed this, as Article I, Section Eight, known as the Postal Clause, specifically authorizes Congress the enumerated power "to establish post offices and post roads." The U.S. Supreme Court later interpreted this clause to allow the creation of postal roads that were used for other concurrent purposes. A law of 1838 designated all existing and future railroads as post roads.
Notable American post roads built for the purpose include:
- Albany Post Road, connects New York City to Albany, the capital of New York state
- Boston Post Road, traverses New England from New York to Boston
Read more about this topic: Post Road
Famous quotes related to united states:
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The popular colleges of the United States are turning out more educated people with less originality and fewer geniuses than any other country.”
—Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)
“Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“We can beat all Europe with United States soldiers. Give me a thousand Tennesseans, and I’ll whip any other thousand men on the globe!”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)