It’s with apparent pride that Philadelphia shakes off its regular litany of national ranking dishonors—it’s already been named among the fattest, ugliest and most miserable cities in America—to accept a ranking it can finally be proud of: fifth most walkable U.S. city.

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Full title: “Led Zeppelin Crashed Here: The Rock and Roll Landmarks of North America”

Author: Chris Epting, author of numerous pop-culture guidebooks, including Elvis Presley Passed Here: Even More Locations of America’s Pop Culture Landmarks

Released: May 1, 2007

Travel genre: Quirky guidebook

Territory covered: North America, including the New York City buildings featured on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti.”

Promo copy: “Pop culture historian Chris Epting takes you on a journey across North America to the exact locations where rock and roll history was made. Epting has compiled nearly 600 rock and roll landmarks, combining historical information with trivia, photos, and backstage lore, all with the enthusiasm of a true rock and roll devotee. No other book delivers such an extensive list of rock and roll landmarks—from beginnings (the site where Elvis got his first guitar), to endings (the hotel where Janis Joplin died), and everything in between.”

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Conventional wisdom says that, given the rise of mass media, regional accents and dialects would disappear and “everyone would sound as distinctly indistinct as a television newscaster.” It won’t be so. In fact, “The Atlas of North American English, the first work to plot all the major speech patterns in the continental United States and Canada, has found the opposite: regional dialects are actually becoming more pronounced,” according to a story in October’s Smithsonian.

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Greetings from Washington D.C., where I’m spending Independence Day in the nation’s capital for the first time. I usually lay low on the Fourth, but today I’m taking part in some of the events around the District. I just returned from hearing Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams read the Declaration of Independence on the steps of the National Archives, fife and drum corps in tow. In a few hours, I’ll be out on the National Mall to see Stevie Wonder and the fireworks show. This will be our only post for the day, but it’s not the only Independence Day material we’ve got. Check out Joel Deutsch’s story about spending the Fourth in Los Angeles with some of his Russian immigrant friends. And over at MSN, Jim has a story about watching Fourth of July fireworks at a U.S. military base in Stuttgart, Germany. Happy Fourth, everyone. 

A lot, especially if that name happens to be “Whorehouse Meadow,” “Squaw Tit” or, say, “Cripple Brush Creek.” Syracuse University geographer Mark Monmonier takes up the subject of controversial place names in a new book, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. In the book, Monmonier writes that “how a nation manipulates and preserves its place and feature names says a lot about its respect for history, minority rights and indigenous culture.” Critic Michael Kenney reviewed the book in today’s Boston Globe and writes that it’s “an entertaining and enlightening excursion.” We’re intrigued.

Related on World Hum: Goodbye “Calcutta,” Hello “Kolkata.” What’s in a Name?

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1991
Territory covered: Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska
A founding editor of Outside magazine, Cahill has been credited with revitalizing adventure writing—a genre that had previously been confined to breathless, semi-fictional tales of danger in the pages of low-culture men’s magazines. The tongue-in-cheek titles of Cahill’s early essay collections—“Jaguars Ripped My Flesh”; “A Wolverine is Eating My Leg”; “Pecked to Death by Ducks”—are a nod to his pulpy precursors, but his writing is the opposite of pulp: informed, nuanced, self-deprecating, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Road Fever, Cahill’s only book-length travel narrative, chronicles a 15,000-mile dash to set a world record by driving overland across the Americas in less than 24 days. In many ways, it’s an anti-adventure book, since a large portion of the tale documents the process of making plans and procuring corporate sponsorship—but this says a lot about the competitive, publicity-driven, and weirdly postmodern state of post-Exploration Age adventure. The author’s partner in the journey is professional endurance driver Gary Sowerby, and together the duo deal with fatigue, dangerous roads, stubborn bureaucrats—and an overabundance of sponsor-supplied pudding—as they race north into the pages of the “Guinness Book of World Records.” As the miles speed by, Cahill’s exuberant reporting and eye for the absurd make for an amusing and exhilarating ride. 

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We thought we’d pay our respects to Martin Luther King Jr. today by spotlighting a few key sights important to his life and the civil rights movement. Ben Brazil’s guide to sights in Sunday’s Washington Post turned out to be a good resource. It mentions the two-story Victorian home in Atlanta’s “Sweet Auburn” section where King was born Jan. 15, 1929. That home, where King spent his first 12 years, is now the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, operated by the National Park Service. Also mentioned is the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where King was assassinated April 4, 1968. In 1991, after years of decline, it opened as the National Civil Rights Museum, exploring the legacy of the civil rights movement. 

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Lisa Whelchel, who played Blair Warner on NBC’s “The Facts of Life” from 1979 to 1988, is in the midst of a journey she calls “The Family Dream.” She and her family are spending a year touring America in an RV, home-schooling the kids, taking in the sites. We know. You’re filled with questions. What is she seeing? How is she feeling? How did Lisa Whelchel come to travel in the comfort of a 40-foot coach and not a mere 37-footer? And how was it working with George Clooney, anyway? Thankfully, Whelchel answers all the big questions on her Web site. Whew.

Literature has inspired travel for as long as mankind has had the written word. In its May/June issue, Book magazine compiled 10 potential lit trips in the United States, from a Jack London-inspired journey to Northern California to a William Faulkner-inspired visit to Oxford, Mississippi. We’re big Thoreau fans, so we flipped to the section on Walden Pond. “Despite the effects of growth and development on the region, Henry David Thoreau would not likely have trouble finding his way between Walden Pond and downtown Concord, Massachusetts, if he were still alive today,” the editors write. The magazine suggests visitors make stops at the Concord Museum and the Ralph Waldo Emerson House, among other places. The article isn’t available online, but the brief introduction is.