CYCLING IN BOSTON: Race and Revival (1880-2000) with author Lorenz Finison.
Lorenz Finison will cover more than a century of cycling history, featuring the roles Boston, Cambridge, and Waltham played in the cycling craze of the 1890s.
Topics will include racing, touring, commuting, bikeways, rails-to trails, bike-trains, bike building, women's cycling, the Tour de Trump, and more.
Finison will feature Kittie Knox, star character from his book, Boston’s Cycling Craze. 1880-1900 (2014). The cycling world immune to prevailing prejudices allowed Knox, a young bi-racial seamstress, to break the color line and challenge gender norms. She was well known in Boston (and Waltham) during the 1890s, and then largely forgotten, as cycling slid into the shadows of the automobile, until it came back in the Renaissance of the 1970s. Finison will feature this revival as well—the topic of his forthcoming book, Boston’s Twentieth-Century Bicycling Renaissance.
Kittie Knox
Lorenz Finison
A Needham resident, Finison is a social psychologist and historian. He researches issues of race, class, and gender and how these factors influence who can ride with whom— who is included and who is excluded? He feels privileged to write about a city he's loved since his arrival as a teenager in 1954, despite its warts and troubles, and its very real racial conflicts.
This talk is FREE and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Advance registration is recommended.
