Josh Howe
This is the third in a series, “History En Vêlo,” about cycling and thinking historically, shared with NiCHE.
In the west hills outside of Portland, there is a climb popular with road cyclists called Old Germantown Road. It’s the sort of climb cyclists often describe as “punchy” — that is, it is not particularly long, but peppered with the whimsical steep pitches that characterize the back roads of regions that rarely see snow. I make it a regular feature of my Portland rides. It never feels good — in fact it usually feels like taking knives to the legs — but I like the aesthetic and the lack of traffic, and I am a sucker for difficult things.
Recently, toward the bottom of the most sustained section of the climb, someone has stenciled the name MAJOR TAYLOR in white paint on the gray pavement. It got me thinking. About cycling. About bodies. And about history.
Marshall “Major” Taylor was an African-American professional cyclist who raced in an otherwise all-white world cycling tour in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Over his career, he racked up a pile of world records and a world sprint championship. He also faced rampant racism and discrimination across three continents during his time on the bike, only to be all but “forgotten” for almost a century by sports historians focused on other, whiter things. His story is fascinating, and has rightly resurfaced in a variety of media after nearly a century of neglect.1 Continue reading
In 1994, 
Like Heidi Bohaker’s work on Anishinaabeg doodem, we wondered how White’s assumption of a cohesive or collective identity among Algonquian-speaking peoples distorted his findings, and about how the book’s emphasis on French-Indigenous relations disproportionately emphasized French authority in a landscape where they occupied a relatively minor “space of power” (to use Elizabeth Mancke’s framework) in a region that included numerous complex Indigenous polities.
