This column was submitted by Evangeline Cessna, Local History Librarian at the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library.

This week the library is featuring titles found in our New Nonfiction collection.

In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan’s and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long. A review of the uphevals at the end of the Reagan era―and their dark legacy today. With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

Intertwined with the true crime narrative, The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery details author Di Rushing’s life in and out of Mississippi, including growing up in 1960s Greenville, attending university, traveling overseas, and the relationships she cultivated along the way. After graduating from Mississippi State University in 1976, Di Rushing and her husband, Sam, found themselves back on their family farm near Merigold, Mississippi, with 350 acres and no idea what to do with it. The couple decided to open the first winery in Mississippi, and with it, a successful business was born. Six years later, a small restaurant joined the Delta winery. By 1990, both were thriving with eight national award-winning wines, a beautiful vineyard, and a successful restaurant. But in March of 1990, unforseen circumstances changed everything. After the Rushings discovered one of the tour guides, Ray Russell, selling drugs in the winery parking lot, they fired him. He responded by terrorizing what they had built for the next nine months. Finally, in the early morning hours, the former guide broke into the winery, crept into the wine cellar, and released the entire inventory―nearly a quarter of a million dollars’ worth―down the drain. Fortunately, his incompetence thwarted his most destructive intention to blow up the restaurant. In his rampage, he broke all the windows, which allowed the gas from the kitchen oven to escape, sparing the premises. Though the Rushings rebuilt with the help of their community, Russell continued to stalk and threaten the young family. As his menacing behavior continued to escalate, the Rushings closed their business of fourteen years and moved to Ouray, Colorado, where they began rebuilding their lives. Twenty-five years later Russell, his wife, and his father were all violently killed.

Deep Inside the Blues collects thirty-four of Margo Cooper’s interviews with blues artists and is illustrated with over 160 of her photographs, many published here for the first time. For thirty years, Cooper has been documenting the lives of blues musicians, their families and homes, neighborhoods, festivals, and gigs. Her photographic work combines iconic late-career images of many legendary figures including Bo Diddley, Honeyboy Edwards, B. B. King, Pinetop Perkins, and Hubert Sumlin with youthful shots of Cedric Burnside, Shemekia Copeland, and Sharde Thomas, themselves now in their thirties and forties. During this time, the Burnside and Turner families and other Mississippi artists such as T-Model Ford, James “Super Chikan” Johnson, and L. C. Ulmer entered the national and international spotlight, ensuring the powerful connection between authentic Delta, Hill Country, and Piney Woods blues musicians and their audience continues. In 1993, Cooper began photographing in the clubs around New England, then in Chicago, and before long in Mississippi and Helena, Arkansas. On her very first trips to Mississippi in 1997 and 1998, Cooper had the good fortune to photograph Sam Carr, Frank Frost, Bobby Rush, and Otha Turner, among others. “The blues come out of the field,” Ulmer told Cooper. Seeing those fields, as well as the old juke joints, country churches, and people’s homes, inspired her. She began recording interviews with the musicians, sometimes over the years, listening and asking questions as their narratives unfolded. Many key blues players of the period have already passed, making their stories and Cooper’s photographs of them more poignant and valuable.

The Presidents and the People is by Corey Lang Brettschneider. American presidents have often pushed the boundaries established for them by the Constitution; this is the inspirational history of the people who pushed back. Imagine an American president who imprisoned critics, spread a culture of white supremacy, and tried to upend the law so that he could commit crimes with impunity. In this propulsive and eminently readable history, constitutional law and political science professor Corey Brettschneider provides a thoroughly researched account of assaults on democracy by not one such president but five. John Adams waged war on the national press of the early republic, overseeing numerous prosecutions of his critics. In the lead-up to the Civil War, James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans. A decade later, Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to guarantee a white supremacist republic after the Civil War. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts that flowed from his corrupt ideas about presidential power. Through their actions, these presidents illuminated the trip wires that can damage or even destroy our democracy.  This is a book about citizens―Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more―who fought back against presidential abuses of power. Their examples give us hope about the possibilities of restoring a fragile democracy.

Wide Awake by Jon Grinspan is an interesting account of our history’s most surprising, most consequential political club: the Wide-Awake anti-slavery youth movement that marched America from the 1860 election to civil war. At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and several women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes, mostly working-class Americans in their twenties, became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history. Within a year, the nation would be at war with itself, and many on both sides would point to the Wide Awakes as the mechanism that got them there. Grinspan examines how our nation crossed the threshold from a political campaign into a war. At its core, Wide Awake sheds light on a question American democracy keeps posing, about the precarious relationship between violent speech and violent actions.

A Passionate Mind by Noliwe Rooks is an up-close and inquisitive account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation. When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Bethune’s success was unlikely: the fifteenth of seventeen children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn how to read and attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age twenty-nine, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the school she had founded in Daytona, Florida—which would become the university that bears her name to this day. Bethune saw education as an essential dimension of the larger struggle for freedom, vitally connected to the vote and to economic self-sufficiency, and she enlisted Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many other powerful leaders in her cause. The story of how Bethune succeeded in a state with some of the highest lynching rates in the country is a testament to the power of a mind and a vision that had few equals.