National Write a Letter of Appreciation Week – March 1-7, 2025

History of National Write a Letter of Appreciation Week

Letters have existed throughout history, from ancient India, Egypt, and Sumer, through Rome, Greece, and China, to the current day. Letters were used to self-educate throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries. Throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries, letters were utilized to self-educate. Information, news, and pleasantries were mostly communicated through letters. Writing letters served as a technique for certain people to learn critical reading, self-expression, polemic writing, and exchanging ideas with people who shared similar interests. Metal, lead, wax-coated wooden tablets, pottery shards, animal skin, and papyrus were among the materials used to write letters in the ancient world. Letters have generally been written on paper in recent years, both handwritten and typed.

Even in ages and regions where literacy was lower, illiterate people could pay literate people to compose letters to and read letters from distant contacts. Letters were significant even in the period of telegrams and telephones, until fax and email further eroded their primacy, especially since the turn of the 21st Century. As communication technology has advanced in recent history, postal letters on paper have been less important as a routine means of communication. Extant letters from past eras are an important type of source material in historiography because of the timelessness and universality of letter writing (the methodology of historians).

For the first time, these ‘private’ letters were published during this historical period to create and retain literary importance. Just as social media channels now allow modern celebrities to present versions of their intimate lives for the public to see and read all about, early modern and 18th-century figures also carefully built themselves in their letters for audiences to be excited to read these written works. Today, emails and, messages are the primary mode of communication, with letters saved for special occasions. Given their rarity, letters are now even more meaningful than ever.