Martin Calkins
Situated precisely at the historical moment before the bicycle transitioned from an elite leisure pursuit into a widely accessible, utilitarian mode of transport at the close of the Gilded Age, child bicycle competitions demonstrate the socio-cultural and demographic transformations driven by industrial expansion and urbanization that occurred in Conneaut, Ohio – a small town on the southern rim of the Great Lakes. The polymathic, micro-historical, and ‘bottom-up’ approach demonstrates how a railroad brakeman and his wife navigated the commercialized opportunities of juvenile bicycle racing to enact their parental agency and leverage competitions to enable their sons to learn the ideals of manhood at a time of rapid change in this region of the Great Lakes.