Full Description
In Newspaper City, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh scrutinizes the reluctance of early Torontonians to pave their streets. He demonstrates how Toronto's two liberal newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Toronto Daily Star, nevertheless campaigned for surface infrastructure as the leading expression of modern urbanity, despite the broad resistance of property owners to pay for infrastructure improvements under local improvements by-laws. To boost paving, newspapers used their broadsheets to fashion two imagined cities for their readers: one overrun with animals, dirt, and marginal people, the other civilized, modern, and crowned with clean streets. However, the employment of capitalism to generate traditional public goods, such as concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, regulated pedestrianism, and efficient automobilism, is complicated. Thus, the liberal newspapers' promotion of a city of orderly infrastructure and contented people in actual Toronto proved strikingly illiberal. Consequently, Mackintosh's study reveals the contradictory nature of newspapers and the historiographical complexities of newspaper research.
Contents
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction Contradictory City
Chapter 1 Newspaper City
Chapter 2 Farmlike City
Chapter 3 Asphalt City
Chapter 4 Discordant City
Chapter 5 Sidewalk City
Chapter 6 Fatal City
Afterword
Appendix - City-page Headlines in the Globe: Motor Vehicle Accidents in Toronto, January to December, 1920 and 1927
Bibliography
End notes
