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5 books match the query 'Bicycles'

cover of Bicycles: Vintage People on Photo Postcards

Bicycles

Vintage People on Photo Postcards

Tom Phillips

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

To celebrate the acquisition of the archive of distinguished artist Tom Phillips, the Bodleian Library asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ordinary people could afford to purchase their own portraits. These portraits allowed individuals to create and embellish their own self images, presenting themselves as they wished to be seen within the trends and social mores of their time. Each book in the series contains two hundred images chosen from a visually rich vein of social history. Their back covers also feature thematically linked paintings, specially created for each title, from Phillips’s signature work, A Humument.
 
Bicycles, as its title suggests, documents the great age of the safety bicycle, which was welcomed as a technology of emancipation for both women and men.  Also included are portraits of competitive racers and newly pedaling toddlers. 

These unique and visually stunning books offer a rich glimpse of forgotten times and will be greatly valued by art and history lovers alike.
 
 “These images are captivating visual vignettes. We may not know who the subjects are, but the postcards offer us a glimpse of their interests, their time, and their world. Tom Phillips's exceptional collection gives us a fascinating chance to retrieve something of these lives.”—Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London
 
“Picture postcards from a century ago capture unique moments in time and place and are a wonderful social history record. Tom Phillips is adept at seeking out and choosing amazingly evocative postcard images.”—Brian Lund, editor, Picture Postcard Monthly
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cover of Bike Lanes Are the End of Us

Bike Lanes Are the End of Us

Alexander S. Dawson

Vanderbilt University Press, 2027

Bike lanes are aspirational projects. They speak to a series of dreams about what North American cities could be, especially in and around an environmentalist and Europhilic vision (the latter having a very long history in the Americas). And yet, cycling infrastructure is built on or alongside the roads and modes of transport that came before it and maps onto preexisting forms of racial and spatial inequality. In many North American communities where social ties have long been fraying, efforts to build bike lanes have replicated the social crises that we see in other spaces.

Amsterdam’s oft-cited bike lanes are integrated within a system of regional trains, buses, and subways, allowing riders to park their bikes and engage in multimodal commuting, and are in turn the product of a social safety net that is among the most robust on the planet. However, in American settings, these projects have been slow to launch and their results have been uneven, in part due to spatial inequality in our cities, and in part because suburbanites and people with means have grown more attached to their private cars, rather than less so, in recent decades.

Recent controversial bike lane initiatives in Mexico City and Vancouver show how such projects not only create uproar among monied urbanites but may actually displace entire modes of transportation used primarily by marginalized residents (especially in the case of Mexico City), when the wish to imitate European models defeats efforts to see a North American city for what it is. In comparing Mexico City and Vancouver, Bike Lanes Are the End of Us traces how bike lane politics collide with distinct racial, spatial, and infrastructural realities to produce “green” reforms that can reinforce existing inequalities just as readily as they promise greater mobility.

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cover of The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

The Cycling City

Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

Evan Friss

University of Chicago Press, 2015

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.
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cover of The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

The Cycling City

Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

Evan Friss

University of Chicago Press, 2015

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

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.
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cover of The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life

The Mechanical Horse

How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life

By Margaret Guroff

University of Texas Press, 2016

With cities across the country adding miles of bike lanes and building bike-share stations, bicycling is enjoying a new surge of popularity in America. It seems that every generation or two, Americans rediscover the freedom of movement, convenience, and relative affordability of the bicycle. The earliest two-wheeler, the draisine, arrived in Philadelphia in 1819 and astonished onlookers with the possibility of propelling themselves “like lightning.” Two centuries later, the bicycle is still the fastest way to cover ground on gridlocked city streets.

Filled with lively stories, The Mechanical Horse reveals how the bicycle transformed American life. As bicycling caught on in the nineteenth century, many of the country’s rough, rutted roads were paved for the first time, laying a foundation for the interstate highway system. Cyclists were among the first to see the possibilities of self-directed, long-distance travel, and some of them (including a fellow named Henry Ford) went on to develop the automobile. Women shed their cumbersome Victorian dresses—as well as their restricted gender roles—so they could ride. And doctors recognized that aerobic exercise actually benefits the body, which helped to modernize medicine. Margaret Guroff demonstrates that the bicycle’s story is really the story of a more mobile America—one in which physical mobility has opened wider horizons of thought and new opportunities for people in all avenues of life.

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