American Science in an Age of Anxiety is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. Through the extensive use of archival sources - including recently released FBI files - as well as published primary and secondary sources, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the postwar politics of science.

By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations and the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, she shows that scientists were neither uniformly helpless victims nor selfless heroes. Rather, her narrative exposes the deep political divisions within the scientific community over the Cold War and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.