Newspaper city : Toronto's street surfaces and the liberal press, 1860-1935 /

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 mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mackintosh, Phillip Gordon, 1960- (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, [2017]
Subjects:
Description
Summary: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.
Physical Description:xv, 348 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9781442646797
1442646799