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Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872

American law defining the Post Office Department as part of the Cabinet

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ7233677 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872, formally entitled as the Act to revise, consolidate, and amend the Statutes relating to the Post-office Department (17 Stat. 283, enacted June 8, 1872) consolidated the United States Post Office Department into the Cabinet of the United States. It is most notable for a rider enacted under section 148; this was the first provision in what later became known as the Comstock Act of 1873.

The Act consolidated 827 sections of scattered postal laws into one code and introduced other operational standardization. The Act provided the administrative backbone until the next major reorganization occurred, in 1970.

Editorial summary

“Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872” enters the record as american law defining the Post Office Department as part of the Cabinet. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Post, Office and Consolidation can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1872, 1873, 1970—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Post, Office and Consolidation.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Post, Office and Consolidation provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7233677. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1872, 1873 and 1970.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872 primary sources, Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872 archive and Post research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Post Office Consolidation Act of 1872” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.