Written by Ellen Schrecker
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps

During the early years of the Cold War, the anticommunist witch hunt that we now call McCarthyism swept through American society. As we will discover, McCarthyism was much more than the career of the blustering senator from Wisconsin who gave it a name. It was the most widespread and longest-lasting episode of political repression in American history. Dozens of men and women went to prison, thousands lost their jobs, and untold numbers of others saw what happened to those people and refrained from expressing controversial or unpopular ideas. McCarthyism remains all too relevant today; if nothing else, it reminds us that we cannot take our basic freedoms for granted.

This course aims to provide a basic understanding of what happened during the Cold War red scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. It will look at this red scare from the perspective of both the victims and the perpetrators, and will try to answer the following question: How could such a politically repressive movement arise in a modern democratic society such as the post-World War II United States?

Ellen Schrecker is a professor of history at Yeshiva University in New York City. After receiving her B.A. and M.A. from Radcliffe College and her Ph.D. from Harvard, she switched from European to American history. She then taught at Harvard, Princeton, and New York University before taking her current position in 1987.

14 Lectures
35 minutes/lecture

1 Junius Scales and My Sixth-Grade Teacher
2 Communism in America
3 Anticommunism in America
4 The Rehearsal for McCarthyism
5 The Cold War Comes to Washington
6 The Orchestra Leader
7 Soviet Espionage and Internal Security
8 The Committees and Their Witnesses
9 Joe McCarthy and the Loss of China
10 The Hollywood Blacklist and Beyond
11 On the Waterfront and in the Schools
12 The Dog That Didn't Bark
13 Collateral Damage
14 McCarthyism and American Democracy