Jon Wiener’s current research focuses on Cold War culture and its commemoration in museums, monuments, and memorials, where its meaning and significance are being defined for ordinary people. Wiener became an important exponent of intellectual freedom when he filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the FBI for their files on John Lennon. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court before most of the outstanding issues were settled in 1997, The story of the litigation is the subject of Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI files (2000). Since 1984, Wiener has been a contributing editor of The Nation, where he writes about campus issues, intellectual controversies, and southern California politics. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. His previous book, Professors, Politics and Pop, is a collection of these essays.
