Discover the joys and benefitsof riding a bikeWhether you're looking to join the Lycra brigade, tear down mountain bike trails or simply teach yourself — or your child — how to ride, this practical guide covers all your needs, from choosing the right bike and accessories to hitting the road and trails. Improve your health and fitness, reduce your carbon footprint and have fun along the way!Pick the bike and equipment that suit you — determine whether ...

In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize—or subvert—that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all...

" . . . the only book-length study documenting the use of human collateral in the nineteenth century." —The Journal of Southern HistoryFor his landmark Debt, Investment, Slaves, Louisiana attorney Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr. performed a thorough survey of parish mortgage records and other manuscripts to create a rich map of antebellum credit relationships in the region. He demonstrates that most credit relationships, collateralized and uncollat...

Through an analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents an innovative look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. He draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organization—the aspect that has dominated historical debates—and slavery as a set of property rights. Slave-based commerce remained central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organiz...

Southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience but were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. Gavin Wright shows that the civil rights struggle was of economic benefit to all parties: the wages of southern blacks increased dramatically but not at the expense of southern whites.

CAMPERVAN CAPERSA Couple's First YearExploring the World of CampervanningWhat do you do when you've got itchy feet but don't want to uproot your life?Buy a campervan!At least, that's what this couple did.After a rather nomadic life, the author settles down with her partner in Cornwall, England. But, after a number of years, those itchy, old feet want to get on the move again.On a restless whim, the couple decide to buy a campervan. It tur...

**Winner of the Lillian Smith Book AwardWinner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeFinalist for the National Book AwardThe Nation's "Most Valuable Book"“[A] vibrant intellectual history of the radical right.”—The Atlantic“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . If you're worried about what all this means for Ameri...

A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action.In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically...

As seen on TVThe bicycle is one of mankind's greatest inventions - and the most popular form of transport in history. Robert Penn has ridden one most days of his adult life. In his late 20s, he pedalled 40,000 kilometres around the world. Yet, like cyclists everywhere, the utilitarian bikes he currently owns don't even hint at this devotion. Robert needs a new bike, a bespoke machine that reflects how he feels when he's riding it - like an ordinary man touching the...

'And yes, I was a sixty-year-old man who wanted to be young again, and that’s laughable for there is no turning back the years, but I didn’t think it was funny. I wasn’t going to try and win the Tour de France. But I was going to try to do what I had been able to do at thirty. I was going to cycle whole days, successive days, along Irish coasts in the west, over the drumlins of County Down, and I was going to ride the horrendously steep Torr Road in north Antrim. I was going to be a boy ag...

Red states, blue states . . . are we no longer the United States? Morris P. Fiorina here examines today’s party system to reassess arguments about party polarization while offering a cogent overview of the American electorate.Building on the arguments of Fiorina’s acclaimed Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, this book explains how contemporary politics differs from that of previous eras and considers what might be done to overcome the unproductive politics of re...

Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the U.S. welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare ...