Aaron J. Leonard is an American author with a particular focus on the history of radicalism and state suppression.

Biography

Leonard was born in Herkimer, New York. He has a BA in Social Sciences and History. He graduated, magna cum laude, from New York University in 2012. He lives in Los Angeles.

Works

He is the author of Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists (Zer0 Books 2015, ISBN 978-1-78279-534-6)^[1] and A Threat of the First Magnitude—FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration: From the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union.(Repeater Books, 2018, ISBN 9781910924709).

In 2020 he published The Folk Singers and the Bureau (Repeater Books). Joe Pagetta, writing in America magazine said, "Aaron J. Leonard’s new book, The Folk Singers and the Bureau, draws from almost 10,000 pages of F.B.I. files on an array of folk artists. It aims to illustrate the considerable impact that the U.S. government’s campaign against Communism had on folk artists in the 1940s and early ’50s."^[2] Daniel Rosenberg, in American Communist History wrote: "Aaron J. Leonard has contributed a solid piece of research to the history of FBI repression of the Communist Party USA by tracing the surveillance, investigation, and harassment of folk singers, many of whom belonged or were sympathetic to the Party."^[3]

In February 2023, his book Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion & Repression - 1955-1972 was published.(Repeater Books, 2023, ISBN 9781914420924). It focuses on folk and pop musicians that were subjects of FBI surveillance and monitoring since the 1950s. Such artists included Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk due to their affiliations with organized groups or specific political activism such as making anti-war statements and contributing to "civil unrest".^[4]

In May 2024 he will publish Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder & Upheaval at the end of the 1970s (Rutgers Univ. Press), the story of the power shifts from late 1978 through 1979 leading to the final phase of the cold war.