Historical Accuracy In Arthur Miller's The Crucible

The horrors of history are passed on from generation to generation in hopes that they will never occur again. People look back on these times and are appalled at how horrendous the times were; yet, in the 1950s, history repeated itself. During this time, Joseph McCarthy, a United States senator from Wisconsin, began accusing people of being communists or communist sympathizers, which is parallel to the Salem witch trials in the late 1690s when innocent people were accused of practicing witchcraft. One of the people McCarthy accused was author and playwright Arthur Miller. To express his outrage at McCarthy’s actions, miller wrote The Crucible, intentionally drawing similarities between the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials.

“Arthur Miller made the play called “The Crucible” during the 1950’s as a response to McCarthyism and the U.S. Governments blacklisted people.”(Blakesley). Miller was then question and accused of “Contempt of Congress” for not identifying people that were at meetings he attended. McCarthyism and The Salem Witch Craft Trials have been two very wrong things that have happened in the history of the United States for a lot of reasons. First off they both wrongfully accused innocent people of performing not accepted actions of those times. In America you have a right of free will and in both cases they were denied this right just because of someone else’s opinion. In both cases of the Salem Witch Craft Trials and McCarthyism people were being accused of acts with little evidence. People pointed fingers at others so they wouldn’t get blamed for anything, so there was a scare factor taking place. Large groups of people supported these acts maybe because of a get on board everyone’s doing it theme, and if you disagreed you were considered a witch or a communist. Our country supported McCarthy until later we soon regretted it. During the 1940’s and 1950’s communism was a scare in the U.S. so McCarthy capitalized on the subject and said two hundred card carrying communist were in the U.S(PBS). With the Salem Trials people capitalized on the scare of witches and everyone starting accusing the “weird” people. Accusations weather true or false can

People tend to believe what they want to believe. Whether the information is presented by celebrities, politicians, or through paid advertisements on social media, it can be misinterpreted as true, even when it was proven false. Misinformation causes people to make reckless decisions based on what they have seen or heard. False information has led to unfortunate events, such as the Salem Witch Trials and prejudice-based violence. False information connects events in both Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and current society, shaping the opinions of the public and allowing authorities to stay in power despite false evidence against them.

In Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” it tells the tale of the Salem Witch Trials. At the time of the play, the McCarthy trials, named after Sen. Joseph McCarthy, were underway. Though, instead of hunting for witches, they were hunting for communists. These two trials may have happened at different points in history, but were in many ways the same. Whether it was death to job loss a lot of lives were changed on account of these trials. “The Crucible” and the McCarthy trials have become historically important because they show the process of power, fear, and turmoil.

The subject of history has always been associated with reality, and hence people sometimes assume that historical fiction is strictly based around factual characters and events. However, an important consideration to remember is that historical fiction often twists the truth, adapting the material that it is based on to relate to different contexts. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible is a famous example of a historical drama that successfully does this, using the Salem witch hunts of 1692 as an analogy for 1950s McCarthyism and highlighting fundamental issues of human nature. This play is often criticised for being historically inaccurate, and as acknowledged by Miller himself in his note on the historical accuracy of the play, “dramatic purposes

The novel, The Crucible was written in 1953 by Arthur Miller, which was based on the Salem Witch Trials existing in the late 1600s. In the play, Abigail and several other young women accuse innocent citizens of Salem for the action of witchcraft. During the trials, many individuals were unfairly persecuted; such as John Proctor. This event in history may be associated with the Red Scare, in which individuals were tried for their questionable influences of communism in the United States. When Miller compares the character of John Proctor to himself, the reader is able to relate the similar experiences that both men faced. The Crucible demonstrates the struggle against corruption involving the court, which lead to the death of many innocent individuals in Salem. The Crucible generates an allegory for Arthur Miller’s struggles with McCarthyism because of his similar experience relating to John Proctor’s battle against the Salem Witch Trials, and the relation between the actions of the court in both situations. Arthur Miller uses several writing methods in order to convey The Crucible as an allegory for his struggles with McCarthyism. Miller demonstrates how the Crucible represents an allegory for his conflict with McCarthyism by relating his experiences with the plot of the novel. Miller relates the novel to his struggles by stating, “Should the accused confess, his honesty could only be proved by naming former confederates.” (Are You Now… 34) Miller is explaining how the court

Everything’s not what it seems. Some people can not handle the ugly truth. A man named Arthur Miller expresses the Salem witch trials that occurred in 1692, with a play that was produced 1953, during the era of McCarthyism. What similarities came about when miller's play about Salem was produced? McCarthyism and The Crucible have multiple parallels due to these similarities: Naming names, lack of proof, and resistance.

During the 1950s, America was involved in the Cold War, and when United States Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that there were communist spies in America, it created mass hysteria among its citizens. This lead to the ruined lives of many innocent Americans. Similar events occurred during the Salem witch trials in 1692. During this time period, it was thought that witches were infiltrating the religious Puritan societies. The suspicion of witchcraft in Salem caused hysteria among the townspeople, which lead to the destruction of many good Christian people and their families. Arthur Miller, who was arrested during the McCarthy era, wrote The Crucible, a play about the 1692 Salem witch trials, to expose the absurdities of McCarthy’s “witch

“YOU’RE A WITCH!”, “YOU’RE A COMMUNIST!” Imagine you’ve been brought to a court or government panel, even though you haven't committed any crime or been charged with one. You are questioned about your political or biblical values and are accused of disloyalty or of being a witch and are asked to incriminate your friends, neighbors and associates. If you don’t cooperate, you risk jail, losing your job, or are killed; this occurred during the Salem witch trials and the McCarthyism era. McCarthyism was a vociferous campaign against alleged communists in the US government and other institutions carried out under Senator Joseph McCarthy in the period 1950–54. Many of the accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, although most did not in fact belong to the Communist Party. The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. The trials resulted in the executions of twenty people, fourteen of them women, and all but one by hanging. The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692/93. The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a an allegory for the Red Scare in the McCarthy era because people believed false evidence out of fear, people falsely accused each other out of fear and self gain, and after the trials the accused lives were

In the late 1940’s, hundreds of screenwriters, actors, actresses and entertainers of the Hollywood film industry faced charges of being subversive to America through spies for the Soviet Union. The FBI was accusing many Americans for being loyal to the communist country, this is similar to witch hunts that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts. The “Red Scare” and the Witch Trials both produced mass hysteria as a result of people’s irrational angst. The Crucible a play composed by American author, Arthur Miller who was many of the accused during the red scare, wrote this play about the town Salem that fell into mass hysteria after a group of girls Abigail Williams, Betty Parris, Ruth Putnam, Tituba and Mary Warren wrongfully accused townspeople

The playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote ‘The Crucible’ in the time period in which World War 2 had just ended a few years back. This affected Arthur Miller’s writing process because the United States was concerned about the rising of communism ideals and the expanding power of the Soviet Union. People pointed fingers at each other and accused each other of being communist. Arthur Miller conveys the Salem witch trials as an allusion to McCarthyism, which led Americans to feel that they were surrounded by a Communist threat. In the play, ‘The Crucible’, during the spring of 1692, in the small Massachusetts village of Salem, the Salem Witch Trials were commenced by a group of infamous girls who were suffering from hallucination and seizure, as if

One of the main inspirations for The Crucible was the search by the U.S. congress for “communist sympathizers” in the 1950’s, the era when Miller was writing the play. Those hearings were each branded as a “witch-hunt,” and audiences in 1953 recognized the resemblance between the Salem witch trials and the current “red scare.”

The Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller about the Salem witch trials, written in 1953 as an allegory to the McCarthy “witch hunts” against communism. Both the Salem and McCarthy “witch hunts” created a “mob mentality” through fear that led to trials against the accused. The girls in The Crucible, when they were discovered dancing naked in the woods and having fits, claimed that witches were responsible for their “sickness.” The powerful personality of one of the girls, Abigail, created a kind of hysteria in the other girls that led them to point fingers at specific women in Salem.

The Crucible was written by Arthur Miller as a comparison to the great red scare of the 1920s. It had a dramatic effect on the entertainment industry and even Arthur himself. The events of the 1680s and 1690s witch accusations were very similar to the Red Scare communist ones of the 1920s. Communism is a form of government where all economic and social activity is controlled by a dominating and perpetual party. Joseph McCarthy of the U.S senate accused Dean Acheson of the U.S secretary of state of being a communist and that he knew that there were 57 other communists in the department.

The play, “The Crucible” is written by Arthur Miller in 1953. During this time of American history, a war had just ended and there was a deeply rooted fear of communists infiltrating American soil; Americans had begun to turn on each other out of fear that people around them were against American ideals. Arthur Miller expressed his concern for the time by writing “The Crucible,” which is written about a witch hunt that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Arthur Miller used the themes of an earlier American event to remind people of his time that their actions were indeed following a historical pattern of fear. The play, “The Crucible” takes place in America in a time of deeply rooted religion, fear of the unknown, and early civilization. The juxtaposition of this play, it’s characters, and the time in which the play was written, teaches a very difficult, yet important, lesson about fear and it’s position in a society of people.