JACEK BURSKI, sociologist, is a research assistant at the Department of Sociology of Culture at the University of Łódź; he is preparing a PhD thesis about the social world of football fans in Poland.KAJA KAŹMIERSKA is a sociologist. An associate professor, she is the director of the Institute of Sociology and head of the Department of the Sociology of Culture at the University of Łódź. Her research interests include: biographical analysis, collective/national identity and memory, migration, borderland identity formation, European identity formation, the sociological analysis of civil society organization activities, and studies on Jewish identity.WIKTOR MARZEC holds a PhD in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University in Budapest, an MA in sociology, and an MA in philosophy from the University of Łódź. His research interests concern historical sociology, labor history, and conceptual history.KAMIL PISKAŁA is a historian and holds a PhD in contemporary Polish history. He graduated from the University of Łódź in 2017. His research interests are focused on the history of labor movements and socialist ideology in the twentieth century, people’s history, and political ideas.KAMIL ŚMIECHOWSKI is a historian. He holds a PhD in the history of Poland, and graduated from the University of Łódź in 2013. He works as an associate professor at the Institute of History and is the secretary of the Interdisciplinary Urban Studies Center, the University of Łódź. His research interests are focused on urban theory, analyses of press discourse, processes of modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland, and the history of Łódź. Currently, he is working on a post-doc research project about the discourse of the urban in the Kingdom of Poland at the turn of the twentieth century.AGATA ZYSIAK is a historical sociologist. She is an assistant professor at the University of Łódź, working on postwar Poland, modernization, and industrial cities. She is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 2017-2018. She also works at the University of Warsaw comparing urban decline in Detroit and Łódź.

This book moves the capital of the nineteenth century. Paralleling the switch of focus from Baudelairian Paris to industrial Manchester, it places the capital of the Polish nineteenth century in the textile industrial hub—Łódź. This is still a revolutionary gesture within Polish studies. The authors have aptly located their particular case study within a broader framework of modernity studies. Deftly integrating broad historical queries of the daily press and theoretical reasoning, they have succeeded in relating the imaginaries and normative orders present among journalists to the expert discourses and agendas of institutional actors.