The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company: Sunday Streetcars and Municipal Reform in Toronto, 1888 - 1897 - Brossura

Armstrong, Christopher; Nelles, H. V.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0195443373 ISBN 13: 9780195443370

Casa editrice: OUP Canada, 2010

Riassunto

Bribery! Corruption! Fist fights on the steps of City Hall. Thunderings from the pulpits! Mass meetings, petitions, rallies, unrest in the streets! The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company is a lighthearted, impeccably researched excursion through the thickets of chicanery, hypocrisy and sanctimony that were the special marks of High Victorian Toronto.
The story is simple: big-money interest who owned Toronto's street railways wanted to run streetcars on Sundays. They claimed this would be a boon to the working man on his day of rest, but it was clear that profit was their real motive. Respectable leaders of Toronto society were adamantly opposed; Sunday streetcars were a desecration of the Sabbath, the work of the Devil. But ultimately, the robber barons won and the cars ran on Sunday-just as the first great bicycle craze began. Everybody bought bikes-some of them from the Methodist Bicycle Company-and the Sunday streetcars were virtually empty.
Revenge is a rollicking good story peopled by flamboyant characters with Good and Evil fighting it out in public view. Richly illustrated with cartoons and photographs from the period, it is an exuberant refutation of the notion that Canadian history is dull.
With a new introduction by the authors, the attractive Wynford edition brings this award-winning classic to a new generation of readers.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Christopher Armstrong is Professor of History at York University. His numerous books on Canadian history have won critical acclaim, and in 2002 he received the Ontario History Society JJ Talman Award for his study of Canadian capital markets in Moose Pastures and Mergers: The Ontario Securities Commission and the Regulation of Share Markets in Canada, 1940-1980. H.V. Nelles is the L.R. Wilson Professor of Canadian History at McMaster University. He has written widely on Canada's history, and his book, The Art of Nation Building, won the Sir John A. MacDonald Prize for the Best Book in Canadian history and Le Prix Clio for the best book on Quebec history.

Contenuti:

• Preface to the Wynford Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• 1.: A Sense of Time and Place
• 2.: Ned Clarke's Toronto
• 3.: Senator Smith's Goldmine
• 4.: The Sale of the Railway and the Purchase of the Council
• 5.: Weathercocks and Flapdoodlers
• 6.: A Business Man and a Business Plan
• 7.: The City Virgin
• 8.: Boodle Everywhere
• 9.: The Redemption of the City
• 10.: Organizing to Whip the Saints
• 11.: The Unbluing of Toronto
• 12.: The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company
• 13.: Postscript
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index

Su questa edizione

• Editore: OUP Canada
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0195443373
• ISBN 13: 9780195443370
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 224