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Does digging up a dead fascist finally put his legacy to rest?

"Do we want to perpetuate a Jim Crow health system?" A brilliant, idealistic physician named Jean Cowsert asked that question in Alabama in 1966. Her answer was no--and soon after, she died under suspicious circumstances. Unearthing the truth of Cowsert's life and death is a central concern of David Barton Smith's Malicious Intent. Unearthing the grim history of our health care system is another. Race-related disparities in American death rates, exacerbated once again by the COVID-19 pandemic, have persisted since the birth of the modern US medical system a century ago. A unique but perpetually unequal history has prevented the United States from providing the kind of health care assurances that are taken for granted in other industrialized nations. The underlying story is one of political, medical, and bureaucratic machinations, all motivated by a deliberate Jim Crow systemic design. In Malicious Intent, David Barton Smith traces the Jean Cowsert story and the cold case of her death as a through line to explain the construction and fulfillment of an unequal health care system that would rather sacrifice many than provide for Black Americans. Cowsert's suspicious death came at a key moment in the struggle for universal health care in the wealthiest country on earth. Malicious Intent is a history of those failed efforts and a story of selective amnesia about one doctor's death and the movement she fought for.

Although Tennessee has a rich history of political scandals, dating back to the founding of the state, the last fifty years have been a confusing, confounding, and sometimes ludicrous period of ne'er-do-welling. Welcome to Capitol Hill is a guide to the state's modern history of corruption. From Governor Ray Blanton's pardon scandals to the FBI investigation that started with now-Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally wearing a wire in the late 1980s to the sexual misconduct that plagues Tennessee politics, this book chronicles it all. Veteran political reporters Joel Ebert and Erik Schelzig draw from interviews with primary and secondary sources, archival documents, and never-before-seen federal investigative files to provide readers with a handy resource to the wrongdoings of our elected officials.