What a difference a year makes! A year ago, on the occasion of the publication of The Secret World of American Communism in Yale University Press’s “Annals of Communism” series, we raised the question of “whether, in today’s intellectual climate, [the] disclosures contained in The Secret World of American Communism will prove to be sufficient to reverse ‘the dominant perspective among academic historians for the past twenty years’ on the subject of the Communist movement in America… . For this ‘dominant perspective’ has been based more on ideology than on an interest in knowing the truth.” (See “Revising the Revisionists on American Communism,” in Notes & Comments for May 1995.)

Yet a year later, while an entrenched anti-anti-Communist perspective no doubt remains dominant in the nation’s classrooms, elsewhere there have been some remarka ...

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