What is your favorite part of history to read/learn about?

if you want some shortcuts, "Goodnight and Goodluck" tries a fairly even and at the McCarthy era HUAC, and "The Front" was written and directed by artists who had been blacklisted (it shows their side, naturally)
"Cradle Will Rock" is very polemic but mostly factual showing of the initial HUAC chaired by Dies

moreso than just HUAC my focus is on the 20th century collision of culture and politics as shaped by US vs Russia/USSR
(one of the lingering fallouts from HUAC is that later 20th century art is highly abstracted (vs social or allegorical) mostly b/c artists want to avoid the real possibility of being blacklisted - and then when art did start making strong cultural statements the NEA got (essentially) shut-down

there are so many odd little moments in the 20th century where one small choice might have diverted huge calamities
one of the most striking is the tale of Maxim Gorky - he was 2nd to Chekhov as russia's leading playwright but was much more of a national art/political figure (essentially he was Bono)
he had landed in the US in 1906, after winning over Europe in his and other cultural figures' attempt to win a velvet revolution in russia
he was enthusiastically greeted as a statesman and and appeared all but certain he was going to raise enough money to overthrow the Tsar
HOWEVER on the evening of his arrival the tsar's propoganda ministers fed the american press the news that the woman gorky was travelling with (Maria Andreeyva - actress from the Moscow Arts Theatre - easily the world's most prestigious theatre company) was NOT his wife
while technically true, russia did not recognize divorce in any manageable way - gorky had been separated from his wife for many years and Maria was essentially his commonlaw wife
but as we like to do, we got our puritan feathers all ruffled, and Gorky woke up to screaming headlines accusing Gorky of trying to destroy american families with his sin
angry mobs - the whole 9 yards - and actually it was Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain who had to secret the 2 of them out of NY and back to europe

it's crazy to wonder if WW1 & 2, Korea, Vietnam and all ancillary Cold War dust-ups might have been avoided if the american press wasn't such a reactionary school marm
you may like The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. You'll be struck by the different feel in politics and politicians then vs now, they seemed much more genuine if just as conniving back then :hihi: