This roundtable will bring together five historians to begin a discussion of the practice of biography and the place of individual lives in the history of the Cold War across the Americas. Our first speaker, Teresa Meade, will look at the Cold War–era activism of the Warsaw-born Jewish refugee Mia Truskier, who from her adoptive home of Berkeley campaigned on behalf of Central Americans fleeing violent counterrevolution in their home countries, repression that was sponsored by the U.S. government under President Ronald Reagan. The next contributor to our roundtable, Daniela Spenser, will discuss the Mexican labor leader and politician Lombardo Toledano, focusing on his trajectory beginning in the later 1940s with the outbreak of the Cold War, as his influence in Mexico was eroded and his Soviet sponsors increasingly turned their backs on him. Speaking third, Barbara Weinstein will trace the ideological trajectory of historian and social theorist Frank Tannenbaum, focusing on his increasingly tense relationships with friends and colleagues in Latin America (and particularly in Mexico) as anti-Americanism intensified during the Cold War. Next, James Woodard will introduce the legendary Brazilian thinker and militant Darcy Ribeiro, and in particular how his experience of the Popular Unity years in Chile (1970-1973) affected his larger scholarly and ideological trajectory, between his avowed radicalism of the 1960s and the social-democratic positions that he increasingly took in the late 1970s and after. The session will be chaired by A. Ricardo López-Pedreros, an accomplished historian of modern Colombian history currently at work on a biography of the sociologist Gabriel Restrepo (1946-). Thus, five individual lives provide geographic coverage spanning the Americas, from the United States to Chile, with additional connections farther afield, before, during, and after the Cold War. By bringing together the so-called biographical turn with the new history of the Cold War (heavily oriented to Asia, Africa, and Europe to date), the panel will speak directly to the interests of these two sizeable communities of scholars, as well as historians of the modern United States, Latin America, several individual Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico), and Central America. Comment from and debate with the audience should make for a lively 90-minute session, and for ensuing informal discussion among participants, in person, over email, and on social media.