The Second Red Scare bears many similar aspects of the historical event of Salem Witch Trials, which turned into a historical basis for the somewhat fictional play of The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. The Crucible was an allegory of The Red Scare and McCarthyism, an era of communist fear and espionage, where the HUAC accused many Americans of being a communist without clear evidence. Similarly so, The Crucible portrayed a time mass hysteria over the fear of people committing witchcraft. The Second Red Scare was very similar to The Salem Witch Trials in the ways that both of these events are fueled by fear and presented unfair trials, insubstantial evidence, and one-sided allegations. Both these events historically reflect each other in ways of…
McCarthyism refers to the act of making accusations against an individual without any proper consideration for evidence. The Patriot Act is a bill that was passed by George Bush after 11t h attacks; the government took it to the advantage and pushed for the Patriot Act which in way was extending the influence and powers of the federal government to have a greater control over the nations under the claim of improving national security. The Crucible on the other hand is a film made by Arthur Miller in 1953, it is a dramatized story of reality about a trial of a witch in Massachusetts, it emphasizes on how trials were unfair to the minorities. The witches of The Crucible, Communists of the McCarthyism and terrorists of The Patriot Act were given the same treatment by the courts and the authorities (Phelan, James 2014).…
Imagine girls dancing in the woods. They think they are discovering witches. In the play and the movie, many people think the witchcraft is the truth. The play is more details than the movie but the movie is better than the play because the movie can build people understand more deep of the story. There are many similar details between the movie and the play.…
Almost every life event seems to have a hero and a villain who contrast each other. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller recreates a perfect example of this concept using two very important main characters. The Crucible itself is about the Salem witch trials which occurred in 1692. In short, it all started when a group of young girls, including Abigail Williams, were caught attempting witchcraft in the woods. When they were caught, they made up lies and flipped the accusations on other villagers that they did not like.…
Nelle Harper Lee, mainly know as Harper Lee was an American Novelist pulitzer prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Lee was studying law and following in her father 's footsteps, then she decided she wanted to be an author. She used many experiences from her childhood, growing up in Monroe Alabama, which included many Civil Right influences. The Crucible, a play written by Arthur Miller in 1953 about the events surrounding the Salem witch trials. Miller was an American screenwriter who liked to bring in the sicingcates of politics in the timezone of his writings and like Lee a pulitzer prize winner.…
1692. That was the historical year in which the Salem witch trials occurred in Massachusetts. It is also the setting of The Crucible and “Young Goodman Brown”. Both stories have questionable morals, as wells as some similarities. Although the two stories have different plots and messages, the characters of Abigail Williams and the allegorical figure of the devil are complementary in that they both tempt the main character and maintain a facade of innocence through their deceiving age standard.…
The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in 1863, but African Americans continued to be separated from the rest of society. The Civil Rights Movement was a protest movement against discrimination and segregation of African Americans in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement began shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that “racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional” in the Brown v Board of Education case in 1954 ("- John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum"). The case was the beginning of the movement that intensified during the 1960’s.…
The Crucible > The Red Scare “...141 people imprisoned, 19 people executed, and two more died from other causes directly related to the investigations.” (Callis, “The Aftermath of The Salem Witch Trials in Colonial America”). The Communist Red-Scare (Began in September 1945 when the U.S. and Canada thought that the Soviet Union was going to infiltrate our government with the idea of obtaining information about the atomic bomb.) and The Crucible/Salem Witch Trials (A wave of hysteria overtook the town of Salem, almost everyone, young and old, was accused of being a witch. They were almost always put to death.) are both widely known for the number of innocent people who were wrongly accused and the accusers of their times.…
Ever heard of the Blair Witch that haunts the Black Forrest in Maryland? It’s based on a true event close to The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, that happened in 1692. The Blair Witch Trials were held because a woman was accused of witch craft, almost identical to Salem, where a group of girls accused over one hundred and fifty men and women of witchcraft. Witchcraft was a sensitive subject in the 15 th and 16 th century, which caused multiple unnecessary deaths to take place. This is what makes the Salem Witch Trials and Blair Witch two of the darkest, most horrid in history.…
The Salem Witch Trials v. The Red Scare - Dawn of Hysteria In the 1690s, mass hysteria overcame Salem, Massachusetts. After exhibiting strange behaviors, people were being accused of witchcraft. Since witchcraft was deemed as a capital crime in 1641 (law2,umkc), the punishment for it was either imprisonment, or hanging. A similar event happened after the end of World War II.…
Signing the Declaration of Independence was a major risk for the men of the Continental Congress. They believed that they had the duty to overthrow an oppressive government in order to protect the rights of citizens. While it was dangerous to create the document in the first place, the men knew that the ultimate benefits would outweigh the risks. In the end, the Declaration became one of the most important documents in the history of the United States. The Crucible presents a similar situation.…
Elie Wiesel, a writer and Holocaust survivor says during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” This idea states that the act of keeping quiet and not questioning an immoral authority only gives power to the oppressors. By speaking up for what is right, the power is given to the people to repair an unjust government.…
The Crucible and 12 Angry Men are two differing plays that unite in the aspect of the justice system. In both plays, we have the conflict that the accused are seen as guilty before the evidence is thoroughly looked into. A difference that sets the two plays apart is that the young girls accused of being witches are not given as much of a chance as the young boy accused of murder. This is due to the differing time periods in which both plays took place in. These similarities and differences are tied together with John Proctor and Juror #8, opposers of the unjust ideologies.…
Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1901-1909, view for the nation became known as the Rooseveltian Nation. In Gary Gerstle’s historical monograph called American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century he makes argument as to why the Rooseveltian Nation collapsed. He argued that the collapse was due to “racial antagonism, anti-war protests and cultural revolt” (313). The civic nation of the Rooseveltian Nation collapsed due to the Civil Rights which sought to integrated, civic nation, while the Black Power sought to segregate, racial nation. Gerstle defined Black Power as “a political ideology calling on African American to free their communities and consciousness from white controls” (295).…
The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the play The Crucible, both display a woman’s ability to manipulate men in societies where they were virtually powerless. Kesey used Nurse Ratched in his novel as an example of a female manipulator in the time period of the late 1950s or early 1960s where women were still seen as subservient citizens that should be in the home. Miller on the other hand, used the character Abigail as a manipulator of men in his play which was set in a Puritan society of the late 1600s where women had a small fraction of the rights that women had during the time of Kesey’s novel. In both of these literary works both women which were antagonists, used their “power” to manipulate the men around them to achieve their own personal goals and compensate for their powerless positions as women in their respective time periods and societies.…