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McCarthyism is a loaded word, but such a useful one that it should become part of our regular historical discourse. All the available substitutes -the great fear, the red scare, the anticommunist crusade, the grand inquest, the inquisition, the witchhunt -require further explanation. Only McCarthyism is historically specific, situating us right in the middle of the anticommunist political repression of the late 1940s and 1950s. Originally, of course, the term referred to the outrageous behavior of Sen. Joseph McCarthy; but language evolves, and there is no good reason to limit ourselves to such a narrow definition. Even the Random House College Dictionary has a broader one; it calls McCarthyism "the attempt to restrict individual dissent or political criticism by claiming that it is pro-Communistic or unpatriotic.", Still, to use the word in a scholarly context invites controversy. McCarthyism can only refer to McCarthy, critics claim. Those on the left charge that the term conceals the repressive activities of the Truman administration; those on the right that it is used to smear legitimate anticommunism. The explosive nature of what is, after all, only a matter of vocabulary shows how politically sensitive the issue remains, as well as why more research is needed For, until recently, we historians have hobbled our own efforts at understanding McCarthyism by identifying it too narrowly with the career of TailgunnerJoe. Such a definition both limits and trivializes our inquiry, condensing a widespread social and political movement into a bizarre piece of personal pathology. Moreover, limiting McCarthyism to McCarthy forces us to conduct our research according to categories developed during the period we are investigating. Once we expand our definition and view McCarthyism in its broader context, as the movement to eliminate communism from American life during the late 1940s and 1950s, we find ourselves confronting a phenomenon that dominated American politics for nearly a decade and one that, despite its importance, is only beginning to be explored.