This documentary history fills a long-standing need for a short yet comprehensive treatment of McCarthyism. The book contains two sections. The first is a compelling essay of about one-hundred pages in which the author discusses the origins and escalation of the anti-communist campaign in the U.S. in the thirties and forties and how that campaign functioned and eventually sputtered to an end in the fifties. The second part of the book consists of twenty-two original documents; transcripts from congressional hearings, FBI reports, speeches, etc., which illustrate the issues and events the author discusses in her essay.