Senator Joseph McCarthy did not create the national obsession with communist subversion. It had arisen in the late 1930s, years before McCarthy had come to public notice. Angry that they had been barred from the corridors of power for 20...

In February 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had charged that the Department of State knowingly harbored Communists. Hearings on McCarthy's accusations were held under the chairmanship of Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland. The...

Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman elected to both houses of Congress. She was the first woman to enter the Senate without being appointed to the position. During World War II, she was the only civilian woman to go to sea in a Navy...

In May 1950, at the very moment that Senator Joseph McCarthy was beginning his crusade against communist subversion, the U.S. Senate created a special committee to investigate another "enemy within": organized crim

[Free Registration/Login Required] An essay tracing the anti-Communist hysteria beginning in earnest at the end of World War II that resulted in Truman's federal Loyalty Security program and ending with McCarthyism in the 1950s.

The McCarran Act was passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the words of the act "to protect the United States against certain un-American and subversive activities by requiring registration of Communist...

Read about the dangers of paranoia when exercised by people of power. The witch-hunting of the McCarthy era made rash and false accusations against supposed Communist sympathizers that affected many lives.

Read the actions taken against a postal worker, who, as a federal worker, was subject to the vague loyalty oath. Find out what the charges where against him and what happened to him.

Looks at the paranoia of the 1950s when Americans lived in fear of communism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities created blacklists of people working in Hollywood, McCarthyism flourished, and the Rosenberg couple were tried...

A brief biography of Nicola Sacco's life before his fateful arrest, perhaps wrongly, for murder in 1920.

A brief look at American life and politics in the 1950s with an increase in consumerism and fear of the Soviet Union.