Evan Friss image

Education

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

Teaching fields and research specialties

U.S., urban, and public history

Current Project

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (under contract with Viking).

Books

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

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

Articles

“Historians’ Books: The Cycling City,” History & Policy (April 2016).

“The Future History of MOOCs: Archivists, Historians, and the Digital Classroom,” The American Historian (May 2015).

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

“The Path Not Taken: The Rise of America’s Cycle Paths and the Fall of Urban Cycling,” in Sanderson, Gary W., ed., Cycle History 20 (Cheltenham, England: John Pinkerton Memorial Publishing Fund, 2010).

“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).

Selected Media

"The Secret History of the Future: Dots, Dashes, and Dating Apps," Slate The Economist, August 7, 2019.

"Lessons from the History of Cycling in NYC," amNewYork, July 31, 2019.

" '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.

"200 Years of Bicycles History in NYC," WFUV (NPR Radio), May 15, 2019.

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

“Cycling in the City: Exploring a Contentious Past (and Present) in New York,” Uptown Radio, April 1, 2019.

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

"New Exhibition Tracks the Centuries-Old Urban Debate Over Bicycles," Metropolis, March 2019.

"How Bicycles Ignited 200 Years of Controversy in New York City," Curbed, March 2019.

Greg Miller “Mapping the Urban Bike Utopias of the 1890s,” National Geographic, February 24, 2017.

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

“Bicycle Fever at the Turn of the Century,” interview on NPR's “With Good Reason,” July 2016.

Back to Top