What might our knowledge of history be like if snapchat had been around in earlier centuries?

The good news is that it wasn’t.  In a time when people wrote letters, not texts or emails, those letters got saved and later curated.  Letters that give us little glimpses into personalities, history and the human condition at another time, in another place.

Shawn Usher, has devoted himself to being a curator of many such letters.  He is the founder of the blog, Letters of Note and now that’s been turned into the book  Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience.

My conversation with Shawn Usher: