At the beginning of 1793 Toronto was the gateway to a distant portage to the Upper Great Lakes, its permanent population a lone fur trader. One hundred and twenty-five years later it was a solid, vibrant metropolis, an industrial powerhouse supporting half a million residents. Toronto is a city built by its people, from the original colonial aristocracy of the Family Compact, to the masses of British and Irish migrants who forged its profound links with Empire, to the polyglot flow of international migration that would ultimately transform the city in the twentieth century. This book recounts their stories, and their stories are the history of Toronto's emergence as a world-class city. In Toronto to 1918, distinguished historian J.M.S. Careless expertly draws Toronto's stories together, creating an illuminating and entertaining portrait of the city. The text is complemented with more than 150 historical illustrations.

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.

Prefixed to the first vol. is "An act for the union of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick ... 29th March, 1867" with special t.p.: Anno regni Victoriæ, Britanniarum reginæ, tricesimo et tricesimo-primo. At a Parliament begun and holden at Westminster ... Toronto, 1868. 45 p.