Click here for additional new Prepub Alert columns  

Cozzens, Peter. A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South. Knopf. 464p. ISBN 9780525659457. $35. lrg. prnt. Downloadable. HISTORY

Egan, Timothy. A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot To Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. Viking. Apr. 2023. 432p. ISBN 9780735225268. $30. HISTORY

May, Gregory. A Madman’s Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom. Liveright: Norton. Apr. 2023. 384p. ISBN 9781324092216. $30. HISTORY

Seletzky, Leta McCollough. The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Counterpoint. Apr. 2023. 304p. ISBN 9781640094727. $27. HISTORY

A retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and prolific author of books about the wars between Indigenous peoples and the U.S. government, Cozzens recounts the early 1800s fighting between the Creek Nation and U.S. government forces (led by first-time combat leader Andrew Jackson)— A Brutal Reckoning that ended with the infamous Trail of Tears. Egan, a New York Times best-selling author, National Book Award winner, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, examines the terrifying 1920s rise of the Ku Klux Klan, spearheaded by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, and the bravery of Madge Oberholtzer, who countered the Klan at great personal cost in A Fever in the Heartland (75,000-copy first printing). In A Madman’s Will, lawyer/author May ( Jefferson's Treasure) tells the story of Virginia senator John Randolph’s manumission in his will of all 383 people enslaved to him, revealing the senator’s ever-changing attitudes toward slavery and how prejudice from the North blocked freedmen from possessing the land Randolph had promised them. Marrell McCollough, the Black man seen in photographs kneeling next to Martin Luther King Jr. when he was assassinated at Memphis’s Lorraine Motel in 1968, was a member of an activist group in discussion with King—and, as daughter Seletzky painfully reveals in The Kneeling Man, an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the group’s activities (50,000-copy first printing).

Click here for additional new Prepub Alert columns