My dissertation examines how a diverse array of Americans and Britons used epistolary practices to wield, negotiate, and critique political power by historicizing the complex linkages between the generic and verbal components of letters and the physical and institutional media by which they were produced and circulated. It considers an efflorescence of epistolary media that occurred during the uneven development of a national communications infrastructure whose political economy militated against letter writing. This project shows how non-postal “routes” and forums such as bound codices, print ephemera, court trials, theatre performances, and archival collections were crucial to the ways in which letters functioned as objects of contemplation, instruments of social differentiation, and the literal stuff of identity formation.