Congratulations to Paul Saba for this year’s Dan Leab Author Award. The award is presented annually to the author of the best article published in the journal American Communist History in the previous year. The award is named in honor of Dan Leab, the journal’s first editor and a founding member of the Historians of American Communism … Read more
In his 1968 text The Anticommunist Impulse, Michael Parenti wrote that “Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.” He argued that anti-communism commanded the budget, military, and foreign and domestic policies of the United States, with consequences for the entire globe. … Read more
The Historians of American Communism has co-sponsored a panel at the 2026 American Historical Association conference in Chicago. The panel titled “Reading Communist Subversion in the Black Freedom Struggle” includes papers from Zifeng Liu, Tony Pecinovsky, Edward Carson, and Denise Lynn and is moderated by Greg Geddes. Come see the panel Thursday, January 8, 2026: … Read more
The first recipient of the Dan Leab Award is Tionne Parris for her article “Claudia Jones and Black Power: A Close Reading of the West Indian Gazette and Afro Asian Caribbean News.” You can find a copy of the article here.
The American Communist History Journal has updated its Aims and Scopes (see below). Please consider the journal for your research: American Communist History is a peer-reviewed, non-partisan journal dedicated to publishing the best, most innovative scholarship on the history of communism and its social, political and cultural impact on the United States. We seek contributions … Read more
