- nathan.cardon@gmail.com
Nathan Cardon
University of Birmingham, School of History and Cultures, Faculty Member
- History, Cultural History, Southern History, American History, Exhibition, Museum, Expositions and Worlds Fairs, African-American History, and 22 moreRace (History), Bicycles, Cycling (History), Cycling, Anthropology, Critical Prison Studies, American Studies, U.S. history, American Civil War, African American History, Blues, 20th Century U.S. History, Jim Crow Segregation, World's Fairs, Atlanta, Civil War Memory, Nashville, Race and Ethnicity, American Literature, Race and Racism, Critical Race Theory, and African American Studiesedit
- I am an Associate Professor of US History in the Department of History and the American and Canadian Studies Centre a... moreI am an Associate Professor of US History in the Department of History and the American and Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Birmingham, UK. I hold a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Toronto. My first book, "A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World’s Fairs," was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. I previously held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
“A Dream of the Future” examines how southerners at the end of the nineteenth century worked through the major questions facing a nation undergoing profound change. In an age of empire and industry, southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. At the expositions, they attempted to understand how the region could be industrial and imperial on its own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War soldiers presented their dreams of the future. In addition to the manuscript an article examining African American participation in the Atlanta and Nashville expositions was published in the May 2014 Journal of Southern History.
My new project, The World Awheel: Americans in the First Global Bicycle Age, 1885-1929 places Americans’ engagement with the bicycle as a technology, sport, leisure activity, and means of transportation within a global framework. It contends that the bicycle changed the meaning of movement for Americans both within the nation and as they went abroad. It emphasizes the ways cycling was a transformative activity predicated on crossing frontiers and fashioning new subjectivities through the cyclist’s interaction with environments familiar and strange. Americans of all races, classes, and genders embraced the bicycle and in doing so expanded both their physical and cognitive horizons. It argues that the immense popularity of the bicycle created new understandings of the local, national, and global, while facilitating sometimes troubling interpretations of this newfound mobility’s relationship to race, class, and gender. Taken together, the research uses the bicycle to make clear the transnational and global connections forged by ordinary Americans prior to the Second World War.edit
At the end of the nineteenth century, the modern safety bicycle and the cultures that surrounded it were global in scale. In tracing the use and adoption of the bicycle in the South, this article reveals the ways in which the everyday... more
At the end of the nineteenth century, the modern safety bicycle and the cultures that surrounded it were global in scale. In tracing the use and adoption of the bicycle in the South, this article reveals the ways in which the everyday experiences of local culture intersected with the world. It argues that the subjectivity of riding a bicycle transformed the ways in which white southerners experienced, thought of, and imagined their region. The article contributes to two shifts in southern studies and the historiography of the New South. It brings recent discussions of the South in the world to the level of the everyday by tracing the experiences of a new technological mobility and its social and cultural worlds. In demonstrating the ways white southerners took up cycling culture, it also integrates the region into the global trends of mass culture that move beyond histories of popular culture in the New South focussed mostly on the region's relationship to the nation.
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The safety bicycle arrived in the U.S. South at the beginning of a transition from relative African American freedom following the Civil War to a reassertion of white hegemony. This article examines how southerners interpreted the... more
The safety bicycle arrived in the U.S. South at the beginning of a transition from relative African American freedom following the Civil War to a reassertion of white hegemony. This article examines how southerners interpreted the meanings and practices of the safety bicycle through a contingent spatial and mobility politics found at the intersection of race and technology. For African Americans, the bicycle was both a symbolic and real opportunity to express modern freedoms at the moment those freedoms were being curtailed. Black cyclists whether they used the bicycle for leisure or utilitarian purposes contested the meanings and limits of mobility in the early Jim Crow period. The South, however, was not the only region of the world where the politics of race shaped bicycle mobilities and this article points to the ways the African American experience of bicycle technology mirrors but does not necessarily replicate places beyond the United States. Ultimately, this article traces how technological innovations such as the safety bicycle can be both disrupt but also uphold structures of power.
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An essay on a wooden bicycle held in the collection of the Birmingham Museum Trust, its connection to the British Empire in Malawi, and cycling's role in resistance to empire in Central-East Africa.... more
An essay on a wooden bicycle held in the collection of the Birmingham Museum Trust, its connection to the British Empire in Malawi, and cycling's role in resistance to empire in Central-East Africa. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/lcahm/departments/historyofart/research/projects/map/issue5/objects-in-focus-nyasaland-bicycle.aspx
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Public-facing version of my Technology and Culture article, "Cycling on the Color Line" (2021).
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Everyday Empires Conference Summary, University of Birmingham, May 2017
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Origins, Inspirations, Ways Forward. Opening essay for the Everyday Empires conference held at the University of Birmingham, May 2017.
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A Dream of the Future examines how southerners at the end of the nineteenth century worked through the major questions facing a nation undergoing profound change. In an age of empire and industry, southerners grappled with what it meant... more
A Dream of the Future examines how southerners at the end of the nineteenth century worked through the major questions facing a nation undergoing profound change. In an age of empire and industry, southerners grappled with what it meant to be modern. At Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition and Nashville’s 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, white and black southerners endeavored to understand how their region could be industrial and imperial on its own terms. On a local, national, and global stage, African Americans, New South boosters, New Women, and Civil War veterans presented their own dreams of the future. White southerners at the fairs exhibited a way of life that embraced racial segregation and industrial capitalism, while African Americans accommodated, engaged, and contested this vision. The Atlanta and Nashville expositions are representative of a developing Jim Crow modernity through which white and black southerners constructed themselves as the ob...