This week on the Lectures and History podcast, a discussion about the Red Scare,

which resulted in widespread fear of a potential rise in communism.

University of California Davis history professor, Catherine Olmsted,

describes how the Red Scare evolved into a wide-ranging conspiracy theory in the United States during the

1940s and 1950s.

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Select to stores and line subject to availability, offer ends 20th of April, excludes Azure Express. Good afternoon. So we have talked this quarter about conspiracy

theories in U.S. history. We talked about conspiracy theories in the 19th century, which mainly

focused on secret societies and on marginalized groups, particularly religious minorities.

And then we talked about how in the 20th century there's this pivot as Americans become

more afraid of conspirators in the U.S. government, and the U.S. government itself becomes the

focus of their fears. Our topic for today is the red scare, the fear of communists infiltrating various institutions

in American life in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Fear of communists in entertainment, communist in the government, and communists in education.

So that's our topic for today.

Now, as you know, this is the second red scare in U.S. history.

We talked earlier about the first red scare, which happened right after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, there was fear

in the United States that there could be a similar revolution here. This second red scare

...