The first half of the twentieth century was a murderous period as political ideologies grew into wars that killed tens of millions of people. Fear of Communism sparked a hysteria in the United States that led to two red scares and the rise and fall of McCarthyism. This book looks at the events that created credible concerns about Communism and those that allowed baseless allegations to ruin the lives of innocent Americans. A timeline plots the history...

Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming....