A Social History of the Bicycle, Its Early Life and Times in America PDF Download

Author: Robert A. Smith
Publisher: New York : American Heritage Press
ISBN:
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Author: Dave Horton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317155149
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
How can the social sciences help us to understand the past, present and potential futures of cycling? This timely international and interdisciplinary collection addresses this question, discussing shifts in cycling practices and attitudes, and opening up important critical spaces for thinking about the prospects for cycling. The book brings together, for the first time, analyses of cycling from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, including history, sociology, geography, planning, engineering and technology. The book redresses the past neglect of cycling as a topic for sustained analysis by treating it as a varied and complex practice which matters greatly to contemporary social, cultural and political theory and action. Cycling and Society demonstrates the incredible diversity of contemporary cycling, both within and across cultures. With cycling increasingly promoted as a solution to numerous social problems across a wide range of policy areas in car-dominated societies, this book helps to open up a new field of cycling studies.

Author: David V. Herlihy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300104189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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The nineteenth century's "mechanical horse" offered an exciting new world of transportation for all and ushered in an era of changes that resonates to the present day, changes cataloged and described in a fascinating history of an engineering marvel.

Author: Evan Friss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675880X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
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.

Author: Evan Friss
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York’s streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city’s first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle’s place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses—recreation, sport, transportation, business—but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are. In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle’s place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the city’s changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Moses’s car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch’s battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today—veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes—reflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York City’s people and its politics.

Author: P. Smethurst
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137499516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This is the first history of the bicycle to trace not only the technical background to its invention, but also to contrast its social and cultural impact in different parts of the world, and assess its future as a continuing global phenomenon.

Author: Robert Turpin
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815635918
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The bicycle has long been a part of American culture but few would describe it as an essential element of American identity in the same way that it is fundamental to European and Asian cultures. Instead, American culture has had a more turbulent relationship with the bicycle. First introduced in the United States in the 1830s, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s as it evolved to become a popular form of locomotion for adults. Two decades later, ridership in the United States collapsed. As automobile consumption grew, bicycles were seen as backward and unbecoming—particularly for the white middle class. Turpin chronicles the story of how the bicycle’s image changed dramatically, shedding light on how American consumer patterns are shaped over time. Turpin identifies the creation and development of childhood consumerism as a key factor in the bicycle’s evolution. In an attempt to resurrect dwindling sales, sports marketers reimagined the bicycle as a child’s toy. By the 1950s, it had been firmly established as a symbol of boyhood adolescence, further accelerating the declining number of adult consumers. Tracing the ways in which cycling suffered such a loss in popularity among adults is fundamental to understanding why the United States would be considered a “car” culture from the 1950s to today. As a lens for viewing American history, the story of the bicycle deepens our understanding of our national culture and the forces that influence it.

Author: Gijs Mom
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782383786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 768

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Book Description
Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century, despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future. Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs to unearth the desires that shaped our present “car society.” Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the vehicle.

Author: Genevieve Carpio
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520970829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.

Author: Murry R. Nelson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313347913
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
Sports and leisure activities serve as a mirror, allowing us to examine the attitudes and values of everyday people. This new reference explores the development and influence of sports in American culture, as well as how sports icons, commercial enterprises, organizations, sporting events, and even fan culture have changed from decade to decade and from era to era, from the foot races of colonial times to the extreme sports of today. Each chapter focuses on key aspects of sports in American culture, including such topics as ethnicity, gender, and economics. Enhanced with numerous sidebars on the movers and shakers, key sporting trends, as well as the controversies that threatened to tear the sports world apart, this insightful reference is ideal for high school and college students who are interested in tracing the evolution of sports and American culture throughout the nation's history. Features include a timeline of important events, numerous photographs, and a bibliography of print and electronic sources for further