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Annie Londonderry is famous for being the first woman to bicycle around the world.
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But, there's more to the story.
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And, the story starts, as most things do—in a dark bar.
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There is no possible way a woman could ride a bicycle around the world.
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Can you imagine a woman trying to do it in a skirt?
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If a woman could do that, I'd pay $10,000.
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I, Annie Londonderry, will take that wager.
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When Annie took that wager, she was oozing with confidence and charisma.
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But, here's the thing, she had never even touched a bicycle.
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In the late 1800's, bicycles were seen as dangerous for women and very unfeminine.
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Riding a bicycle was a revolutionary act.
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Legend has it, she cycled from Boston to New York City to Paris riding her bike one-footed after an injury.
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To India, hunting tigers with royalty.
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Singapore, Hong Kong, getting caught up in a war and sustaining a gunshot wound to her shoulder.
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Nagasaki, being interned in a Japanese prison.
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How did she get over oceans?
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Don't worry about it.
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San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and all the way back to Boston in exactly 15 months.
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She did it.
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The End.
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Well, not all of that was exactly true.
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And, you are?
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I'm Peter Zheutlin, and Annie was a my great-grandaunt.
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OK, so then what actually happened?
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She was full of tall tales.
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Even her name, Annie Londonderry, wasn't real.
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Her real name was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky.
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She even concocted the story of the wager.
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And she definitely was not shot or thrown into a prison during the Chinese-Japanese War.
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Well, what about all that other stuff like the leg injury?
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She did injure her leg.
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How about hunting for tigers with royalty?
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That's false.
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So, with some true stuff and some not so true stuff, how do you view her journey?
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Although hers was a remarkable physical achievement,
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her real achievement was becoming world-famous as a symbol of the women's liberation movement in the 1890s.
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Annie's sheer audacity and the way she fought for herself, for her own adventures, on her own terms, was remarkable for her time.
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Even if her story was kinda, sorta, not totally accurate.