About the Book
At the close of the nineteenth century, new printing and paper technologies fueled an expansion of the newspaper business and publishers were soon reeling off as many copies as Americans could be convinced to buy. Newspapers quickly saturated the United States, especially its cities, which were often home to more than a dozen daily papers apiece. Using New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago as case studies, Julia Guarneri shows how city dailies became active agents in creating metropolitan spaces and distinctive urban cultures.Newsprint Metropolis offers a vivid tour of these papers, from the front to the back pages. Paying attention to much-loved features, including comic strips, sports pages, advice columns, and Sunday magazines, she tells the linked histories of newspapers and the cities they served. Themed sections for women, businessmen, sports fans, and suburbanites illustrated entire ways of life built around consumer products. Guarneri also argues that while papers provided a guide to individual upward mobility, they also fostered a climate of civic concern and responsibility.
Charity campaigns and metropolitan sections painted portraits of distinctive, cohesive urban communities. Real estate sections and classified ads boosted the profile of the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while maintaining cities' roles as economic and information hubs. All the while, editors drew in new reading audiences women, immigrants, and working-class readers helping to give rise to the diverse, contentious, and commercial public sphere of the twentieth century.
About the Author :
Julia Guarneri is university lecturer in US history at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a fellow of Fitzwilliam College.
Review :
"Gracefully written, with many appealing historical photos and illustrations, Newsprint Metropolis presents case studies of four different cities: New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago....The book's detailed and lively examination of social history commands interest from both scholars and general readers...."--Nancy L. Roberts "American Periodicals"
"Guarneri's decision to examine mass-readership newspapers in four major cities allows her not only to look at the epicenter of newspaper publishing at the turn of the century--New York--but also to examine the similarities and differences in newspaper publishing in other major metropolitan markets. The result is detailed and fascinating social history, as well as a set of interlinked arguments regarding the 'metropolitan' and its relationship to the creation of regional and national cultures."-- "Alice Fahs, author of Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space"
"Impressive. . .Julia Guarneri makes a convincing case that newspapers played an essential role in American life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . .This book will likely become the definitive study of turn-of-the-century newspapers. . .It will also appeal to those seeking a prehistory to the news media of the twenty-first century."-- "The American Historian"
"Newsprint Metropolis is a splendid study of big city daily and Sunday newspapers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Guarneri explores the marvelously diverse universe of newspaper content and influence, from news and advertising, to comics and advice columns, to politics and popular culture. And she persuasively supports a bold claim: that newspapers were not just chroniclers but were creators of the modern American city."-- "David Paul Nord, Indiana University"
"An ambitious, engaging, and persuasive history of this most quintessentially metropolitan institution. . . . Guarneri makes a compelling argument that urban newspapers were a creative force that helped forge a modern, metropolitan social order in the United States. Her emphasis on readers is especially welcome. . . . She makes creative use of circulation data, commentary, letters, and surveys. . . . Guarneri shrewdly
infers reading experiences from the way newspapers were organized and written."-- "The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era"
"As social history, Newsprint Metropolis offers a deeply sourced and engaging account of the complicated relationship between newspapers and cities, and the ways in which the two intersected. . .One of the strengths of Newsprint Metropolis is Guarneri's holistic approach with primary sources. She dives beyond front pages and intro newspaper folds, examining Sunday sections, comics, advice columns, theater sections, and business directories. And while large metropolitan dailies are covered, she does not forget the role weekly, African-American, and foreign language newspapers played in the lives of city dwellers."-- "American Journalism"
"Beautifully written, brightly illustrated, and prodigiously researched, Guarneri's Newsprint Metropolis will, the day it is published, become the 'go-to' book on the history of twentieth century American newspapers. We forget, at our peril, how important the daily newspaper was in spreading wide and far the gospel of business, the joys of consumerism, the tensions between the local and the national, and the changing gender roles that defined daily life in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. Guarneri's new book, like all good history, brings our present into focus by illuminating some essential, but nearly forgotten aspects of our past."-- "David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst"
"In her wonderful new book, Julia Guarneri returns us to the salad days of the mass daily at the turn of the twentieth century. . . Guarneri is a skilled and loving reader of old newspapers. Newsprint Metropolis provides an excellent depiction of a now-distant era of booming cities and booming newspapers, and an insightful account of the modern life-styles they brought into being."-- "The Journal of American History"
"Not in several decades has a scholar offered as comprehensive and geographically balanced an account of the American daily newspaper in its commercial and aesthetic heyday. In clear, crisp, and lively prose, at once authoritative and evocative, Newsprint Metropolis neither presumes nor demands prior familiarity with the period or the historical literature. Instead it rewards curiosity about a time when cheap daily papers anchored, expanded, and reshaped their massive readership's sense of community and place."-- "David Henkin, University of California, Berkeley"
