Death in McComb: The J. Patrick Allen Story is set in southern Mississippi as the world faces its most recent upheaval. One Monday morning a father of three leaves for work, and does not return home. Trick Allen is killed when proper safety protocols are not followed by ChemCo, a global corporation. The industrial site is swarmed with first responders while this young man's friends and family are left to wonder what went wrong. Each character, associated with Trick's death, the settlement, and the aftermath that follows, is heard from within this fictional tale that mirrors life on this fallen Earth. In March of 2020 while the world faced turmoil, economic upheaval and racial strive industrial parks across America continued normal operations. As small businesses were boarded up, and church houses were closed, global corporations like ChemCo garnered a larger and larger share of world markets as stock prices rose and annual salaries of chief executive officers soared. Neither of these reflected the misery of the populace or the dangers faced by those at work.

"On August 13, 1969, two men picked up Tina Marie Andrews, a twelve-year-old girl, in downtown McComb, Mississippi, a city with a notorious history of racial violence. The men took Andrews and a friend just outside town to an oil field, where they shot her. Andrews' friend escaped and later identified the two killers as McComb police officers. A grand jury indicted both for the murder, but no one was ever convicted of the crime: one officer was acquitted; the other had charges against him dropped. Other than in contemporary local newspaper coverage, the story of Andrews' murder has not been told. Indeed, to this day, many people in the community hesitate to speak of the matter. Trent Brown's 'Murder in McComb' is the first comprehensive examination of the crime, the lengthy investigation into it, and the two extended trials that followed. Brown also explores the public shaming of the state's main witness - a fifteen-year-old unwed mother - and the subsequent desecration of the victim's grave. His study deftly reconstructs various accounts of the murder, explains why the juries reached the verdicts they did, and explores the broader forces that shaped the community in which Tina Andrews lived and died. One of the features that distinguishes Brown's work from other accounts of civil rights era violence is the fact that the murder of Tina Andrews was not a racially motivated killing. Everyone involved in this story was white. However, Tina Andrews and her friend Billie Jo Lambert, the state's main witness, were 'girls of ill repute,' as one of the defense attorneys put it. To some people in McComb, they were trashy children of undistinguished families who got little more than they deserved. In the end, Brown suggests that Tina Andrews had the great misfortune to be murdered in a town where local people were eager to support law and order and stability after the challenges of the civil rights movement"

Few episodes in the modern civil rights movement were more galvanizing than the 1964 brutal murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. As we approach the 40th anniversary of the murders in June 2004, "Murder in Mississippi" provides a timely and telling reminder of the vigilance democracy requires if its ideals are to be fully realized.

The bible of music's deceased idols—Jeff Buckley, Sid Vicious, Jimi Hendrix, Tupac, Elvis—this is the ultimate record of all those who arrived, rocked, and checked out over the last 40-odd years of fast cars, private jets, hard drugs, and reckless living. The truths behind thousands of fascinating stories—such as how Buddy Holly only decided to fly so he'd have time to finish his laundry—are coupled with perennial questions, including Which band boasts the most dead members? and Who had the bright idea of changing a light bulb while standing in the shower?, as well as a few tales of lesser-known rock tragedies. Updated to include all the rock deaths since the previous edition—including Ike Turner, Dan Fogelberg, Bo Diddley, Isaac Hayes, Eartha Kitt, Michael Jackson, Clarence Clemons, Amy Winehouse, and many, many more—this new edition has been comprehensively revised throughout. An indispensable reference full of useful and useless information, with hundreds of photos of the good, the bad, and the silly, this collection is guaranteed to rock the world of trivia buffs and diehards alike.

Forty-six men (no women) were hanged on Iowa gallows between 1834 and 1965, the time span when capital punishment was the land of the land in Iowa. "Iowa and the Death Penalty" tells who the men were, what they did, what issues they and their crimes raised. Forty-three were murderers, three were rapists. They committed some of the most heinous crimes in Iowa history, but their deaths have left behind lingering questions. Iowa's experience with the death penalty was not a comfortable one.

Employing never-before-used historical materials, the authors of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press reveal how Mississippi journalists both expressed and shaped public opinion in the aftermath of the 1955 Emmett Till murder. Combing small-circulation weeklies as well as large-circulation dailies, Davis W. Houck and Matthew A. Grindy analyze the rhetoric at work as the state attempted to grapple with a brutal, small-town slaying. Initially, coverage tended to be sympathetic to Till, but when the case became a clarion call for civil rights and racial justice in Mississippi, journalists reacted. Newspapers both reported on the Till investigation and editorialized on its protagonists. Within days the Till case transcended the specifics of a murder in the Delta. Coverage wrestled with such complex cultural matters as the role of the press, class, gender, and geography in the determination of guilt and innocence. Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press provides a careful examination of the courtroom testimony given in Sumner, Mississippi, and the trial's conclusion as reported by the state's newspapers. The book closes with an analysis of how Mississippi has attempted to come to terms with its racially troubled past by, in part, memorializing Emmett Till in and around the Delta.

On Saturday, September 5, 1964, the family of Albert W. "Red" Heffner Jr., a successful insurance agent, left their house at 202 Shannon Drive in McComb, Mississippi, where they had lived for ten years. They never returned. In the eyes of neighbors, their unforgiveable sin was to have spoken on several occasions with civil rights workers and to have invited two into their home. Consequently, the Heffners were subjected to a campaign of harassment, ostracism, and economic retaliation shocking to a white family who believed that they were respected community members. So the Heffners Left McComb, originally published in 1965 and reprinted now for the first time, is Greenville journalist Hodding Carter's account of the events that led to the Heffners' downfall. Historian Trent Brown, a McComb native, supplies a substantial introduction evaluating the book's significance. The Heffners' story demonstrates the forces of fear, conformity, communal pressure, and threats of retaliation that silenced so many white Mississippians during the 1950s and 1960s. Carter's book provides a valuable portrait of a family who was not choosing to make a stand, but merely extending humane hospitality. Yet the Heffners were systematically punished and driven into exile for what was perceived as treason against white apartheid.