Posts Tagged ‘Cold War’
1958–A Year in Review
I turn 60 this week. Which doesn’t seem possible. I finished my PhD fifteen years ago. I got married nine years ago. I’m just now reaching my stride in a career I love. By any reasonable accounting of a life that would make me about forty. And yet the year is clearly printed on my…
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McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part 2: Attacking “Communists”, and Anyone Else Who Got In His Way
If you’re coming in late to the party, you may want to read the previous post. Here’s the short version: in 1948 Joseph McCarthy won a seat in the US Senate with a dirty campaign and began his senatorial career with a press conference calling for striking miners to be drafted, court-martialed, and then shot.…
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McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part I: Dirty Tactics
Senator Joe McCarthy* and the Red Scare of the 1950s have been on my mind a lot lately. McCarthy took the very real fear many Americans felt about the spread of communism** and turned them into an official witch-hunt for his personal political benefit. Born to a Wisconsin farm family in 1908, McCarthy left school…
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