Postal Service Presents Annual Awards on Postal History

Author of book on the history of African American Postal Workers Granted Senior Prize

WASHINGTON, March 29, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Philip F. Rubio, assistant professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University has been awarded the Rita Lloyd Moroney Senior Prize from the U.S. Postal Service for his book, There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2010). 

The Rita Lloyd Moroney Awards are designed to encourage study and publication of the history of the American postal system and to raise awareness about the significance of the postal system in American life. They include the Senior Prize ($2,000) for work published by faculty members, independent scholars, public historians, and other non-degree candidates and the Junior Prize ($1,000) for work written or published by undergraduates or graduate students.

This year's Junior Prize has been presented to Joseph M. Adelman for his article, "'A Constitutional Conveyance of Intelligence, Public and Private': The Post Office, the Business of Printing, and the American Revolution," published in the journal Enterprise & Society, 11 (no. 4, 2010).  He wrote this article while a doctoral student in History at Johns Hopkins University.

The Moroney Awards are intended for scholarship on any topic on the history of the American postal system from the colonial era to the present — including the history of the imperial postal system that preceded the establishment of the American postal system in 1775. Though submissions must be historical in character, they can draw on the methods of disciplines other than history, for example, geography, cultural studies, literature, communications, or economics. Comparative or international historical studies are eligible if the American postal system is central to the discussion.

Rita Lloyd Moroney, the awards' namesake, began conducting historical research for the Postmaster General in 1962 and later served as of the U.S. Postal Service historian from 1973 to 1991. Additional information on these awards and application instructions are at usps.com/postalhistory/moroneyaward.htm.

A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 150 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $67 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world's mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 29th in the 2010 Fortune 500. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.

SOURCE U.S. Postal Service