Lowell Lecture
Cycling In Boston: Race and Revival (1880-2000)
Date & Time
Dec. 5, 2018 at 7 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Location
Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation
Located in the Historic Francis Cabot Lowell Mill
Park in the Embassy Theatre Lot — GPS "42 Cooper Street, Waltham"
154 Moody Street Waltham, MA 02453
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
A Needham resident, Larry 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.
Presenting Organization
Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation
Topics
Contact
Bob Perry (director@charlesrivermuseum.org, 7818935410)
Larry 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.