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 ...

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.

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...

The award-winning author of Founding Brothers and The Quartet now gives us a deeply insightful examination of the relevance of the views of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams to some of the most divisive issues in America today.The story of history is a ceaseless conversation between past and present, and in American Dialogue Joseph J. Ellis focuses the conversation on the often-asked question "What would t...

Walter E. Williams applies an economic analysis to the problems black Americans have faced in the past and still face in the present to show that that free-market resource allocation, as opposed to political allocation, is in the best interests of minorities. He debunks many common labor market myths and reveals how excessive government regulation and the minimum-wage law have imposed incalculable harm on the most disadvantaged members of our society.

The author of The Whiskey Rebellion "dig[s] beneath history's surface and note[s] both the populist and anti-populist dimensions of the nation's founding" ( Library Journal).Recent movements such as the Tea Party and anti-tax "constitutional conservatism" lay claim to the finance and taxation ideas of America's founders, but how much do we really know about the dramatic clashes over finance and economics that marked the founding of America? Dissent...

In this thoughtful mix of history and politics, the New York Times bestselling author and editor of National Review—the conservative bible founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—traces Abraham Lincoln's ambitious climb from provincial upstart to political powerhouse and calls for a renewal of the Lincoln ethic of relentless striving.Revered today across the political spectrum, Abraham Lincoln believed in a small but active government in a nation defined by aspiration....

The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice. And yet, in their efforts to sustain family ties, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all classes.In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow...

" Gangs of America is a brilliant page-turner revealing how powerful, greedy corporations wage institutional terrorism." —John Stauber, coauthor of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!The corporation has become the core institution of the modern world. Designed to seek profit and power, it has pursued both with endless tenacity, steadily bending the framework of law and even challenging the sovereign status of the state. Where did the c...

"Simply brilliant. . . . The first survey of African American history to rival John Hope Franklin and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's From Slavery to Freedom." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Ordinary people don't experience history as it is taught by historians. The same people who lived through the Civil War and the eradication of slavery also dealt with the hardships of Reconstruction, so why do we almost always treat them separately? In Children of Fire, r...