Red Scares

Harvard FAS

The specter that haunted Europe when the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 continues to shape American political discourse to this day. This course reveals how charges of fealty to radical "foreign" ideologies have operated as rhetorical and political strategies for much of U.S. history. The so-called First Red Scare, precipitated by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, followed on fears and persecution of anarchists, socialists, and other labor radicals in the…