The Red Scare is a period in U.S. history during which the fear of communism was the most pervasive influence on politics, culture, and everyday life. While there were two major Red Scares, the first ...

If we want to understand how we arrived in this authoritarian moment in 2025, we need to understand one of the central pathways that brought us here: McCarthyism. In his firsthand account of the 1949 ...

Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation's ...