Award-winning "Vanity Fair" reporter Rose has written a gripping, revealing drama that is also a compelling, accessible, and timely exploration of race and criminal justice as it addresses the corruption of due process as a tool of racial oppression.

Columbus is the third-largest city in Georgia, and Red Clay, White Water, and Blues is its first comprehensive history. Virginia E. Causey documents the city's founding in 1828 and brings its story to the present, examining the economic, political, social, and cultural changes over the period. It is the first history of the city that analyzes the significant contributions of all its citizens, including African Americans, women, and the working class. Causey, who has lived and worked in Columbus for more than forty years, focuses on three defining characteristics of the city's history: the role that geography has played in its evolution, specifically its location on the Chattahoochee River along the Fall Line, making it an ideal place to establish water-powered textile mills; the fact that the control of city's affairs rested in the hands of a particular business elite; and the endemic presence of violence that left a "bloody trail" throughout local history. Causey traces the life of Columbus: its founding and early boom years; the Civil War and its aftermath; conflicts as a modern city emerged in the first half of the twentieth century; racial tension and economic decline in the mid-to-late 1900s; and rebirth and revival of the city in the twenty-first century. Peppered throughout are compelling anecdotes about the city's most colorful characters, including Sol Smith and His Dramatic Company, music phenom Blind Tom Wiggins, suffragist Augusta Howard, industrialist and philanthropist G. Gunby Jordan, peanut purveyor Tom Huston, blueswoman Ma Rainey, novelist Carson McCullers, and insurance magnate John Amos.

Over eight bloody months in the mid-1970s, a serial rapist and murderer terrorized Columbus, Georgia, killing seven affluent, elderly white women by strangling them in their beds. In 1986, eight years after the last murder, an African American, Carlton Gary, was convicted for these crimes and sentenced to death. Though to this day many in the city doubt his guilt, he remains on death row. Award-winning reporter David Rose has followed this case for a decade, in an investigation that led him to, among other places, The Big Eddy Club-an all-white, private, members-only club in Columbus, frequented by the town's most prominent judges and lawyersas well as most of the seven murdered women. In this setting, Rose brings to light the city's bloodstained history of racism, lynching, and unsolved, politically motivated murder. Framed by the tale of two lynchings-one illegally carried out at the start of the last century, and the other carried out with legal due process at the end of it, The Big Eddy Club is a gripping, revealing drama, full of evocatively drawn characters, insidious institutions, and the extraordinary connections that bind past and present. The book is also a compelling, accessible, and timely exploration of race and criminal justice, not only in the context of the South, but in the whole of the United States, as it addresses the widespread corruption of due process as a tool of racial oppression.

The provocative true account of the hanging of four black people by a white lynch mob in 1912--written by the great-granddaughter of the sheriff charged with protecting them.

Few lives are more worthy of examination than George Marshall and his fifty years of loyal service to his nation. Set against the backdrop of four major conflicts - two world wars, Korea, and the Cold War - Marshall's education in military, diplomatic, and political power, replete with their nuances and ambiguities, runs parallel with America's emergence as a global superpower. The result is a defining account of one of our most consequential leaders.

Josephine "Dadie" Jordan. Dadie, the niece of famed Charles Dana Gibson (creator of the Gibson Girl and former owner of Life Magazine) was born into a well-connected and powerful Washington, D.C., family, but learned at an early age that the life of a society girl was not for her. She set off on the journey of a lifetime, and her compelling story is a tug-o'-war between tragedy and triumph. Her only goal was to live life on her own terms no matter the consequences, and she did just that. Although Dadie manages to be simple and highly complicated at the same time, given the totality of her life, one can only admire her. Because she insisted on living her life on her terms and in her own way, her story is filled with ebbs and flows. These ebbs and flows are anything but minor, and her trials and tribulations are of the most consequential nature. Given the twists and turns in this book, one would think it must be a work of fiction. It's not fiction. This is the real-life story of one woman who constantly overcame obstacles in order to turn her dreams into reality. The public and the media often seem to be under the impression that celebrities and politicians are the only people worth writing about. Dadie Jordan takes the reader through her complex life, baring all and proving that nothing could be farther from the truth.