Hi, I'm Shannon, the podcast producer at C-SPAN, and on this episode of the Lectures

and History podcast, a discussion on communism and the Red Scare. University of California

Davis history professor, Catherine Olmsted, teaches a class on how the Red Scare evolved into a

wide-ranging conspiracy theory in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.

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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,

...