Around the World on Two Wheels

The "remarkable saga" of the bold nineteenth-century woman who made a splash by cycling around the world (The Winston-Salem Journal).
Until 1894, there were no female sport stars, no product endorsement deals, and certainly no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. Annie Londonderry changed all of that.
When Annie left Boston in June of that year, she was a brash young lady with a forty-two-pound bicycle, a revolver, a change of underwear, and a dream of freedom. She was also a feisty immigrant mother of three who had become the center of what one newspaper called "one of the most novel wagers ever made": a high-stakes bet between two wealthy merchants that a woman could not ride around the world on a bicycle. The epic journey that followed took the connection between athletics and commercialism to dizzying new heights, and turned Annie Londonderry into a symbol of women's equality.
A vastly...