Education

Ph. D., Graduate Center, City University of New York

Teaching fields and research specialties

U.S., urban, and public history

Books

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking, 2024). [New York Times Bestseller; A Time Must-Read Book of 2024; The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024; Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books of 2024; People magazine’s Book of the Week; Literary Hub’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2024; Goodreads Choice Award for History, 2024; Virginia Literary Award Winner, 2025.]

On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2019).

The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Selected Articles

“Where Did All the Black Bookshops Go,” Washington Post, August 6, 2024.

“The Bookstore That Helped Create Modern American Literature,” Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2024.

“Writing Bicycles: The Historiography of Cycling in the United States,” Mobility in History, 6 (2015).

“Blacks, Jews, and Civil Rights Law in New York, 1895-1913,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 2005).

“From Cooperstown to University Heights: Halls of Fame and American Memory,” Journal of Archival Organization, 3, no. 4 (2005).

Fellowships

Monticello, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (2026)

MacDowell, Peter Wirth Fellow (2022)

Selected Media

"Browsing Is a Pleasure in This History of the Bookstore," New York Times, August 4, 2024.

"Serious browsers will love this history of American bookstores," Washington Post, August 1, 2024.

"The Past, Present, and Future of our Favorite Bookstores," 1A (NPR), August 2024.

"Evan Friss Traces the History of American Bookstores," The Book Case with Charlie Gibson, August 2024.

" 'Critical Mass': The Bike Ride That Changed the City," WNYC (NPR Radio), July 25, 2019.

"Bicycle Diaries: Two Centuries of New York City History," New York Times, May 23, 2019.

"On Bicycles," All of It with Alison Stewart, WNYC (NPR Radio), May 10, 2019.

"It’s Been a Bumpy 200-Year Ride for NYC’s Historically Hated Bikes," New York Post, March 2019.

C-Span Lecture on "The Suburbs," January 2017