Professor of History Maurice Isserman was interviewed for a New York Times article (3/20/07) about the donation of memorabilia to New York University from the Communist Party USA. According to the Times "The cache contains decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands about how good party members should behave." In the article, Isserman said "the party started out as an underground revolutionary organization but achieved its greatest successes and popularity in the late 1930s as part of the Popular Front, which it joined at Moscow's direction.
"At the same time, he said, some Communist Party members were recruited into an espionage network, which expanded tremendously during World War II, and ultimately infiltrated the team working on the atomic bomb." Isserman is an expert on 20th-century U.S. history, particularly the 1960s and reform and radical movements. He is co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s and author of book, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington.
