Author Diane McWhorter's latest book project, "Moon of Alabama: From Nazi Germany to Tranquility Base, via the Segregated American South," explores how German scientists from Hitler's Third Reich helped to create the rocket that shot the Apollo 11 mission into space.
At the end of World War II, the United States recruited Wernher von Braun and more than a hundred other Germans who had worked on the V-2 missile, which the Third Reich used against London and Antwerp.
Diane McWhorter RI ’12 is renowned for the Pulitzer Prize–winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. Focused on her hometown of Birmingham in 1963, the book is about history, class, race, the steel industry, and the McWhorter family itself. But its scope is narrow, when compared with her new project.