American Inquisition; The Era Of McCarthyism.nfo
General Information
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Title: American Inquisition: The Era Of McCarthyism-
Author: The Modern Scholar
Read By: Ellen Schrecker
Genre: Lecture
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc
Abridged: No
Original Media Information
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Media: CD
Number: 7
Source: Downloaded
File Information
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Number of MP3s: 96
Total Duration: 8:12:24
Total MP3 Size: 452.27
Parity Archive: No
Ripped By: jonboy
Encoded With: LAME 3.95
Encoded At: CBR 128 kbit/s 44100 Hz Mono
ID3 Tags: Set, v1.1, v2.3
Book Description
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American Inquisition: The Era Of McCarthyism
Professor
Professor Ellen Schrecker
(Yeshiva University)
Biography:
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.
Professor Shrecker is a child of the 1950s whose sixth-grade teacher
was a victim of the red scare. She decided to write about McCarthyism
after teaching a course about it more than twenty years ago and discovering
that there was no book that would make the anticommunist furor comprehensible
to her students. Since then she has become widely recognized as one
books and articles on the subject are Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism
in America, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 1998; The Age of McCarthyism:
A Brief History with Documents; and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and
Book Award for 1987.
Professor Schrecker has also written about contemporary academic freedom
both as the co-editor (with Craig Kaplan) of Regulating the Intellectuals:
Perspectives on Academic Freedom in the 1980s and, from 1998 to 2002,
as the editor of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of
University Professors. Among her other publications are a monograph
on Franco-American relations in the 1920s and a Chinese cookbook. Currently
she is editing an anthology of original essays on the meaning of the
Cold War, to be published by the New Press in 2004.
Course Syllabus
Lecture 1 Junius Scales and My Sixth-Grade Teacher: Two Stories of
the McCarthy Era and What They Tell Us About Political Repression in
Cold War America
Lecture 2 Communism in America: The World of the Witches
Lecture 3 Anticommunism in America: The World of the Witch Hunters
Lecture 4 The Rehearsal for McCarthyism: Anticommunism and Political
Repression Before the Cold War
Lecture 5 The Cold War Comes to Washington: Communism, Anticommunism,
Lecture 6 The Orchestra Leader: J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the
Machinery of McCarthyism
Lecture 7 Soviet Espionage and Internal Security: The Big Spy Cases
and Their Political Impact
Lecture 9 Joe McCarthy and the Loss of China: Anticommunism as Partisan
Politics
Lecture 10 The Hollywood Blacklist and Beyond: The Entertainment Industry
Under Fire
Lecture 11 On the Waterfront and in the Schools: Political Tests for
Employment
Lecture 13 Collateral Damage: Private Lives During the Red Scare
Lecture 14 McCarthyism and American Democracy: What Were the Costs?
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?
In order to answer that question, this course will look at earlier red
scares as well as at some of the key players and institutions involved.
It will examine those aspects of the domestic and international politics
of the late 1940s and 1950s that contributed to the rise of the anticommunist
furor. It will also explore the most important political trials of the
era as well as investigate the experiences of its more anonymous (and
perhaps more typical) victims. Finally, it will assess the costs of
McCarthyism. How did it affect the men and women directly involved with
it? And, more important, how did it affect American culture, politics,
and the rest of American society?
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