Batterson, a fellow mathematician (and now professor emeritus at Emory University), undertook The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis out of a certain curiosity about what had led the University of Michigan to dismiss the young instructor after his interrogation by HUAC in 1953. A precocious student from a left-wing family, Chandler Davis entered Harvard at age sixteen. Chandler’s father, Horace Davis, had used it, along with the First Amendment, when testifying before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1953. In addition to providing a rich account of the inquisitions of the 1950s, The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis provides food for thought about the fate of the First Amendment in our own times. His detailed inquiry in The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis provides the historical insight that I associate with the best accounts of this kind: motives are complex, power a critical variable, timing an unpredictable factor, and rational argument not necessarily a winning strategy.