American Legends: The Life of Jesse Owens

Name: American Legends: The Life of Jesse Owens
Brand: Charles River Editors
SKU: 41325742457002
Price: 6.99 USD
Availability: InStock

By: Charles River Editors

ISBN: 9781518811555

$6.99

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Description

*Includes pictures *Includes Owens' quotes about his life and career *Includes accounts of the 1936 Olympics *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents “Although I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.” – Jesse Owens A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. The Olympics have long been the center of attention in the sports world, but perhaps no moment in the history of the games was as poignant as Jesse Owens’ performance in Berlin in 1936. Owens would finish his career with 4 gold medals and become known as "perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history" (as his obituary in the New York Times put it), but nearly 80 years later, it’s the context that has made his performance so memorable. Owens was one of the greatest track athletes in the country in the 1930s, and while he was at Ohio State, he set 3 world records and tied another one within 45 minutes at a Big Ten meet in 1935, but hurdles on the track weren’t as hard to clear as ones he had to deal with away from sports. As a young black man, he had to deal with entrenched racism across the country, from staying in segregated hotels to not being eligible for a sports scholarship, In 1936, World War II was still a few years away, but Adolf Hitler was fully in control of Nazi Germany and hoped to use the Olympics as a showcase of the resurgent German nation. Internationally, Hitler’s Germany was not yet a major concern to the vast majority of people unfamiliar with politics, nor were the domestic policies being carried out by the Nazis, but some still thought the United States should not even participate in the Olympics that year.

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