Bostons Cycling Craze 1880 1900

Download or read book Boston's Cycling Craze, 1880-1900 written by Lorenz John Finison and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1877 to 1896, the popularity of bicycles increased exponentially, and Boston was in on it from the start. The Boston Bicycle Club was the first in the nation, and the city's cyclists formed the nucleus of a new national organization, the League of American Wheelmen. The sport was becoming a craze, and Massachusetts had the largest per capita membership in the league in the 1890s and the largest percentage of women members. Several prominent cycling magazines were published in Boston, making cycling a topic of press coverage and a growing cultural influence as well as a form of recreation. Lorenz J. Finison explores the remarkable rise of Boston cycling through the lives of several participants, including Kittie Knox, a biracial twenty-year-old seamstress who challenged the color line; Mary Sargent Hopkins, a self-proclaimed expert on women's cycling and publisher of The Wheelwoman; and Abbot Bassett, a longtime secretary of the League of American Wheelman and a vocal cycling advocate for forty years. Finison shows how these riders and others interacted on the road and in their cycling clubhouses, often constrained by issues of race, class, religion, and gender. He reveals the challenges facing these riders, whether cycling for recreation or racing, in a time of segregation, increased immigration, and debates about the rights of women.

Download or read book Boston’s Black Athletes written by Robert Cvornyek and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2024-07-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport often mirrored the racial climate of the time, but it also informed and encouraged equality on and off the field. In Boston, the Black athletic body historically represented a challenge to the city’s liberal image. Boston's Black Athletes: Identity, Performance, and Activism interprets Boston’s contested racial history through the diverse experiences of the city’s African American sports figures who directed their talent toward the struggle for social justice. Editors Robert Cvornyek and Douglas Stark and the contributors explore a variety of representative athletes, such as Kittie Knox, Louise Stokes, and Medina Dixon, that negotiated Boston’s racial boundaries at sequential moments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to demonstrate Boston’s long and troubled racial history. The contributors’ biographical sketches are grounded in stories that have remained memorable within Boston’s Black neighborhoods. In recounting the struggles and triumphs of these individuals, this book amplifies their stories and reminds readers that Boston’s Black sports fans found a historic consistency in their athletes to shape racial identity and cultural expression.

Download or read book The Cycling City written by Evan Friss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old. The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.

Download or read book The Cycling City written by Evan Friss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Evan Friss shows in his mordant history of urban bicycling in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle has long told us much about cities and their residents. In a time when American cities were chaotic, polluted, and socially and culturally impenetrable, the bicycle inspired a vision of an improved city in which pollution was negligible, transport was noiseless and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country blurred. Friss focuses not on the technology of the bicycle but on the urbanisms that bicycling engendered. Bicycles altered the look and feel of cities and their streets, enhanced mobility, fueled leisure and recreation, promoted good health, and shrank urban spaces as part of a larger transformation that altered the city and the lives of its inhabitants, even as the bicycle's own popularity fell, not to rise again for a century. --Publisher's description.

Download or read book Stunts of Late Nineteenth-Century New York written by Kirstin Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stunts of Late Nineteenth- Century New York: Aestheticised Precarity, Endangered Liveness examines the emergence of stunts in the media, politics, sport and art of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. This book investigates stunts in sport, media and politics, demonstrating how these risky performances tapped into anxieties and fantasies concerning work, freedom, gendered/ raced/ classed bodies and the commodifi cation of human life. Its case studies examine bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, stunt journalists such as Nellie Bly, and cycling feats including Annie Londonderry’s round- the- world venture. Supported by extensive archival research and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity, liveness and surrogation, Smith theorises an under- examined form which is still prevalent in art, politics and commerce, to show what stunts reveal about value, risk and human life. Suitable for scholars and practitioners across a range of subjects, from Performance Studies to gender studies, to media studies, Stunts of Late Nineteenth- Century New York explores how stunts turned everyday precarity into a spectacle.

Download or read book The Atlas of Boston History written by Nancy S. Seasholes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few American cities possess a history as long, rich, and fascinating as Boston’s. A site of momentous national political events from the Revolutionary War through the civil rights movement, Boston has also been an influential literary and cultural capital. From ancient glaciers to landmaking schemes and modern infrastructure projects, the city’s terrain has been transformed almost constantly over the centuries. The Atlas of Boston History traces the city’s history and geography from the last ice age to the present with beautifully rendered maps. Edited by historian Nancy S. Seasholes, this landmark volume captures all aspects of Boston’s past in a series of fifty-seven stunning full-color spreads. Each section features newly created thematic maps that focus on moments and topics in that history. These maps are accompanied by hundreds of historical and contemporary illustrations and explanatory text from historians and other expert contributors. They illuminate a wide range of topics including Boston’s physical and economic development, changing demography, and social and cultural life. In lavishly produced detail, The Atlas of Boston History offers a vivid, refreshing perspective on the development of this iconic American city. Contributors Robert J. Allison, Robert Charles Anderson, John Avault, Joseph Bagley, Charles Bahne, Laurie Baise, J. L. Bell, Rebekah Bryer, Aubrey Butts, Benjamin L. Carp, Amy D. Finstein, Gerald Gamm, Richard Garver, Katherine Grandjean, Michelle Granshaw, James Green, Dean Grodzins, Karl Haglund, Ruth-Ann M. Harris, Arthur Krim, Stephanie Kruel, Kerima M. Lewis, Noam Maggor, Dane A. Morrison, James C. O’Connell, Mark Peterson, Marshall Pontrelli, Gayle Sawtelle, Nancy S. Seasholes, Reed Ueda, Lawrence J. Vale, Jim Vrabel, Sam Bass Warner, Jay Wickersham, and Susan Wilson

Download or read book Early History of Malden, An written by Frank Russell and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Settled in the 1640s and originally a part of Charlestown, Malden grew over two centuries into a thriving residential and manufacturing city. Meet fiery revolutionary Peter Thacher and Malden industrialist and philanthropist Elisha Converse. Explore the details of the first bank robbery homicide in the United States. Learn about Malden's instructions for independence, which predated the Declaration of Independence. Delve into the suspicion and intrigue surrounding the infamous murder of Frank Converse. Author Frank Russell brings to life the first 250 years of Malden history.