The bicycle has long been a part of American culture but few would describe it as an essential element of American identity in the same way that it is fundamental to European and Asian cultures. Instead, American culture has had a more turbulent relationship with the bicycle. First introduced in the United States in the 1830s, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s as it evolved to become a popular form of locomotion for adults....

In late 1998 and the early months of 1999, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was an organization in crisis. Revelations of a slush fund employed by Salt Lake City officials to secure votes from a number of IOC members in support of the city's bid for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games invited intense scrutiny of the organization by the international media. The IOC and its president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, staggered through the opening weeks of...

When he first took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke a color barrier that reached back sixty years to the very origins of American baseball. He would go on to play in six World Series and help the Dodgers win the 1955 World Championship. But Robinson was much more than just a baseball player. This book collects columns which Robinson wrote primarily for the New York Post and the New York Amsterdam News, as well as including...

Robinson takes readers on a globe-trotting tour that combines a historian's in­sight with vivid personal memories going back to just after World War II. From experiencing the 1948 "Austerity Olympics" in London as a young spectator to working as a journalist in the Boston Marathon media center at the moment of the 2013 bombings, Robinson offers a fascinating first-person account of the tragic and triumphant moments that impacted the world and shaped...

In 1979, a group of women athletes at Michigan State University, their civil rights attorney, the institution?s Title IX coordinator, and a close circle of college students used the law to confront a powerful institution-- their own university. By the mid-1970s, opposition from the NCAA had made intercollegiate athletics the most controversial part of Title IX, the 1972 federal law prohibiting discrimination in all federally funded education programs...

In the complex world of the 21st century, the ability to use innovation to solve problems or make products better is a critical skill for kids to possess. This book uses a sport kid's love, swimming, to highlight how innovation has been used to make the sport and the people who compete in it, better.