The Supreme Court had ruled that segregated waiting rooms and lunch counters in terminals serving interstate buses were illegal, but across the Deep South the "whites only" signs stayed up. On 4 May 1961 thirteen volunteers of the Congress of Racial Equality, black and white together, set out from Washington, D.C., on two buses to test the ruling all the way to New Orleans. In Alabama they were met by mobs, a burning bus and police who looked away; hundreds more riders followed them into the jails of Mississippi.
The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.
In 218 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal set out from Spain to attack Rome by the one route the Romans never expected: overland, across the Pyrenees, the Rhône and the Alps, with tens of thousands of soldiers, horses and 37 war elephants. Five months later he came down into the plain of the Po with a battered but unbeaten army, and within weeks had won his first two victories in Italy.
The route follows the march as told by the Greek historian Polybius, who wrote about seventy years later and walked the Alpine route himself. Nobody knows for certain where Hannibal crossed the Rhône or which pass he used, so several pins are marked speculative.
In the spring of 334 BC Alexander, the 22-year-old king of Macedon, crossed into Asia with an army of Macedonians and Greeks to make war on the Persian Empire. Eleven years later he had defeated the Persian king Darius III three times, taken Egypt, burned Persepolis and led his men to the rivers of the Punjab — and then died in Babylon at the age of 32, his empire stretching from Greece to India.
The route follows the campaign through its turning points, with Arrian's Anabasis, written four centuries later from earlier accounts, as the main guide. Several battlefields can only be placed approximately; their pins are marked as such.
