This New York Times–bestselling author’s account of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin offers a “vivid portrait not just of Owens but of ’30s Germany and America” (Sports Illustrated).
 
At the 1936 Olympics, against a backdrop of swastikas and goose-stepping storm troopers, an African American son of sharecroppers won a staggering four gold medals, single-handedly falsifying Hitler’s...

On August 3, 1936, when Jesse Owens, the 22-year-old son of a sharecropper, entered the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, he was barely able to control his anger in the face of Nazi racism. But instead of letting himself be distracted, the young athlete channeled his raw emotions into one of the most remarkable achievements in athletic history: four gold medals in two days. This film explores the legacy of Owens' stunning victories in Hitler's Germany and...

When Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1924, he held up a foreign law as a model for his program of racial purification: The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act, which prohibited the immigration of those with hereditary illnesses and entire ethnic groups. When the Nazis took power in 1933, they installed a program of eugenics - the attempted "improvement" of the population through forced sterilization and marriage controls - that consciously drew on the...