The result of meticulous historical scholarship, Newsprint Metropolis provides a cleanly written account of the role played by major US metropolitan newspapers in the making of cities and their inhabitants from 1880 to 1930. For her case studies Julia Guarneri chooses Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The interest of Guarneri’s book, uninterrupted by any urban theorizing, lies in the explication of how this making occurred and in the numerous illustrations enhancing that explication. Both the decades and the cities at the center of the argument prove well chosen. Although the book’s introduction, which provides a less than fulsome account of the diversity of Americans, their news, and newspaper options, raises some questions about how they might fare in its pages, the chapters do tell a story increasingly attuned to exactly which readers are being made as Americans by major metropolitan newspapers, how, and why.
At the beginning of this...
