Harvey Klehr, ANDREW W. MELLON PROFESSOR OF POLITICS AND HISTORY AT EMORY UNIVERSITY. In his 36 years on Emory's faculty, he has received the Emory Williams Teaching Award (1983), Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award (1995), and the Thomas Jefferson Award (1999). His current research interests include American communism and Soviet espionage in America.

When the former Soviet Union released previously secret documents in the 1990s related to Soviet spying in the United States, Harvey Klehr was the first Western scholar to see them. In 1995, just three years after Klehr first opened the files of the Communist International in Moscow, he co-authored The Secret World of American Communism, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It was Klehr’s second of three Pulitzer nominations.

Having investigated not only Soviet files but also recently declassified U.S. materials related to the Cold War, Klehr has produced an intriguing array of research that covers the American Communist Party, explores notorious cases like Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and even re-evaluates the complex character of Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose quest to uncover communists in the U.S. in the 1950s carries themes that are relevant today.

Harvey Klehr earned a bachelor's from Franklin and Marshall College and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for School Teachers in 1991, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, and 2003. The author or co-author of a dozen books and more than 60 articles, Mr. Klehr was named Mellon professor in 1996. His most recent publication is Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics (co-author, 2006).

Earlier this year, Common Core's report shows a nation STILL AT RISK. Nearly a quarter of students polled could not identify Adolf Hitler and half had no idea what the Renaissance was. To learn more read the report, press release or stories at ABC News, CBS News, The New York Times, and USA TODAY. Or take the test yourself.

FROM THE BENCH: "One unintended effect of the No Child Left Behind Act, …, is that it has effectively squeezed out civics education because there is no testing for that anymore and no funding for that. And at least half of the states no longer make the teaching of civics and government a requirement for high school graduation. This leaves a huge gap, and we can't forget that the primary purpose of public schools in America has always been to help produce citizens who have the knowledge and the skills and the values to sustain our republic as a nation, our democratic form of government," former justice Sandra Day O'Connor said. (cont'd)

CAMPAIGN FILE: Sen. John McCain recalls his English teacher: “There was one friendship that enriched my life at Episcopal High School beyond measure... Mr. Ravenel was head of the English Department... He loved English literature, and taught us to love it as well... He made us appreciate how profound were the emotions that animated the characters in Shakespeare's tragedies. MacBeth and Hamlet in his care were as compelling to boys as they were to the most learned scholar.” (cont'd)

CAMPAIGN FILE: Sen. Barack Obama said “One of the problems with No Child Left Behind is that it has become so reliant on a standardized test model that—first of all—subjects like history and social studies have gotten pushed aside. Arts and music time is no longer there. So the child is not having the well-rounded educational experience I benefited from and most in my generation benefited from.” (cont'd)