Written by one of the nation’s most prolific, influential, and respected historians of postwar America, ‘Learning on the Left’ capaciously and compellingly explores the role that people associated with Brandeis University played in shaping the nation’s left in the decades after the university’s founding in 1948. Whitfield is a master storyteller, building interwoven lives into a book that uniquely captures the contributions that people associated with Brandeis made to the nation’s history. He has deeply researched this book, in both archival and published sources, over which he has tremendous command. Much but not all of the book presents what he calls “profiles” on well and lesser known figures. In the vast literature on the history of American higher education there is, quite simply, nothing like this.