Around the World on Two Wheels

Book excerpt: For more than a century, the story of the audacious and charismatic Annie Kopchovsky and her attempt to circle the world by wheel has been lost to history. Who was this mysterious young woman on a bike? How did she manage, in the 1890s, to make a trip around the world by bicyle? What was she like? How did she free herself from the social constraints that surrounded women of the Victorian era to undertake such an adventure? And how did an anonymous working-class Jewish mother fromthe tenements of Boston's West End transform herself into an internationally renowned globe-trotter?