Collier's The National Weekly cover: early automobiles on a city street with policeman

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Collier's The National Weekly was a major American general-interest magazine, and this cover puts a row of early automobiles on a city street under the watch of a uniformed policeman. That pairing is the detail worth dwelling on: the cars are still new enough to draw a crowd of onlookers, while the officer stands for the traffic rules that were only beginning to take shape. Covers like this one were often illustrated rather than photographed, and they helped readers in the early twentieth century picture the automobile as an everyday part of city life.

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