Newsprint Metropolis

City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans

Newsprint Metropolis
Julia Guarneri
RRP:
NZ$ 83.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 66.40
Paperback
Not defined - 368pg
21 Dec 2020 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226758329
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
At the turn of the twentieth century, ambitious publishers like Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and Robert McCormick produced the most spectacular newspapers Americans had ever read. Alongside current events and classified ads, publishers began running comic strips, sports sections, women' s pages, and Sunday magazines. Newspapers' lavish illustrations, colorful dialogue, and sensational stories seemed to reproduce city life on the page. Yet as Julia Guarneri reveals, newspapers did not simply report on cities; they also helped to build them. Metropolitan sections and civic campaigns crafted cohesive identities for sprawling metropolises. Real estate sections boosted the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while maintaining cities' roles as economic and information hubs. Advice columns and advertisements helped assimilate migrants and immigrants to a class-conscious, consumerist, and cosmopolitan urban culture. Newsprint Metropolis offers a tour of American newspapers in their most creative and vital decades. It traces newspapers' evolution into highly commercial, mass-produced media, and assesses what was gained and lost as national syndicates began providing more of Americans' news. Case studies of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee illuminate the intertwined histories of newspapers and the cities they served. In an era when the American press is under attack, Newsprint Metropolis reminds us how papers once hosted public conversations and nurtured collective identities in cities across America.
"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" "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" "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"
Julia Guarneri is university lecturer in US history at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a fellow of Fitzwilliam College.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226758329
Published: 21 Dec 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Pages: 368

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