COPYRIGHT 2024 AARON J. LEONARD
Photo: Erika Morilla
Aaron J. Leonard is an author and historian with a particular focus on the interplay of radicalism and repression. He is author, with Conor Gallagher of Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists, and A Threat of the First Magnitude, pathbreaking books that revealed the untold story of the FBI's efforts in the 60s-early 70s against US Maoism.
Along with those works he, with Gallagher, published examinations based on secret information about the FBI's role in the killing of Black Panther Party leader, Fred Hampton.
Following his first two books he turned to writing about contention in the cultural realm. In The Folk Singers & the Bureau, and Whole World in an Uproar he tracks the interplay of artists such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sis Cunningham, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and a host of others who sparred with forces of the status quo in producing their music.
In May 2024 he will publish Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder & Upheaval at the end of the 1970s (Rutgers Univ. Press), reframing the map of the end of the much-maligned Seventies decade.
He is currently working on a history of the repression leveled at the Communist Party, U.S.A. in the twentieth century, Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism, also to be published by Rutgers Unoversity Press.
He has a BA in Social Sciences and History magna cum laude, from New York University. Originally from the central New York town of Herkimer, he lived most of his adult life in Brooklyn, but now calls Los Angeles home.