OPERATION MIND
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book description
Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Douvan’s Operation Mind is a body of evidence, a prophetic warning, and a call to action about the urgency of doing all we can to prevent thought control in America. In 1952, this meticulously researched pamphlet documented the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ attacks and impact. The HUAC abused its charge to intimidate and silence academics, union members, social critics, scientists, artists, teachers, political opponents, rabbis and other religious leaders, to make them appear suspect and “un-American” in the eyes of the American people.
The 2025 reprint of Operation Mind offers a foreword by comparatist Silke-Maria Weineck, an essay by historian Alan Wald connecting Operation Mind’s history of McCarthyism with present-day attacks on academic freedom, and a new (2023) introduction to the text by Natalie Zemon Davis.
about the authors
Natalie Zemon Davis was a foremost historian of early modern Europe. Her first works focused on France, plumbing the archives for records that elucidate the lives of ordinary people, especially marginalized groups and women. She is best known for The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), a work that uncovered the case of a sixteenth-century imposter and was later made into a highly acclaimed film. Davis’s later scholarship focused on the daily interactions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims and on slaves and slaveholders, with a particular interest in their social encounters and cultural exchanges.
Elizabeth Douvan’s pioneering research on the social and psychological condition of Americans before and after the changes that swept the country in the 1960s painted an intriguing portrait of shifts in American mental health, family life, the roles and status of women, and adolescent development and behavior. The co-author with Joseph Veroff and Richard Kulka of “The Inner American” and “Mental Health in America,” published by Basic Books in 1981, Douvan “brilliantly traced the historical changes in men and women’s sense of self over the second half of the 20th century, as American society moved from an emphasis on community connections to an emphasis on intimate relationships.” [Veroff]
Silke-Maria Weineck is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is interested in figurations of power, be they literary, cultural, or institutional.
Alan Wald is H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The author of nine books on the US literary and intellectual Left, he is a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and the University of Michigan Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.