[LINK] The two latest Historicist pieces

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Historicist feature, an exploration by Kevin Plummer of some interesting if underexplored corner of Toronto's history, has produced two great pieces the two Saturdays past.

• "'Alderman or Alderlady?'", Plummer takes a look at the first women to run for civic office in Toronto after it was possible for women could do so in 1919, starting with pioneer Constance Hamilton. It turns out that not many people at the time seem to have paid attention to them, or at least not enough to give us an idea what things were like.


• Plummer took a look at the life of George McCullough, a man born in rural Ontario who started as a paperboy for the Globe and went on to merge all of Toronto's dailies into the modern Globe and Mail. He went so far as to try to cobble together a radio network to spread the Globe and Mail's influence and his own controversial attempts at fireside chats, but in the end his manic depression killed him.