Salem Witch Trials In The Crucible

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” said George Santayana. If this is true, then why have we continued to repeat something like the Salem Witch Trials on more than one occasion, including the recent uproar of sexual assault accusations? Although The Crucible and modern day accusations of sexual assault differ in the ways that these assault accusations are in modern times and they are also on something that is not related to religious beliefs, they ultimately have more in common, like how evidence was and is shaky for some cases, all accusations were started by a domino effect, and reputations were ultimately ruined even if the accused were proven innocent eventually.

It’s 1692 in Salem Massachusetts, complete fear is everywhere in town. People are afraid to leave their homes in fear of accusations. It all started at the end of last year. A few girls in town began to experiment with magic by gathering around a crystal ball to try to find the answer to questions such as “who they would fall in love with “. I was too scared and wanted no part in it. The conjuring took place at the Parris house where Tituba, an Indian slave lives, she was in charge of the rituals. Since they began to practice these rituals, the girls involved, Master Parris’ daughter and niece, are now sick. They have constant fits, twitching, crying, making odd noises, and huddling in corners. The family called in doctors, and they have been treating them for many illnesses. Nothing is helping. Many weeks have passed and they are running out of reasons for their strange behavior. All of their symptoms seem to lead to one belief, they are possessed by the Devil. I have stayed away, I do not want them to accuse me of anything.

In The Crucible how did the people of Salem react under the pressure of the false accusations and convictions of the Salem Witch Trials? The girls in Salem practiced witchcraft and blamed lots of the innocent people that would be tried and penalized, just to take the pressure off themselves. All of the girls are guilty and they got away with it. The mature people of Salem valued justice, this would cost them their lives by trying to disprove the court saying the girls are frauds and Danforth’s decisions were wrong. Arthur Miller makes it clear in The Crucible that justice requires honesty and you will have to be willing to sacrifice to achieve it.

From court trials to hanging, from historical artifacts and the book “The Crucible”. This is all that happened during the Salem Witch Trials that occurred in 1692 in Massachusetts. This happened in a puritan community that, unfortunately, believed in witches and witchcraft. A story being told by a slave named Tituba quickly got out of hand as the girls being told the story started rumors that they were cursed. The girls participated in illegal fortune telling activities, which led to a game of blame. Because of the three girls “acting strangely”, innocent civilians of the small town began to perish.

Many explanations for the cause of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 have been offered by historians since the first girl fell ill to bewitchment in December 1961. This marked the beginning of the witch hunt that ended with the death of twenty convicted “witches”. Historical writers have tried to allocate one particular factor or event as the cause of the Trials, but it is more likely that many of these factors and events are connected and a number of these issues are at the centre of the trials. The context that these historians are writing in are reflected in their work and perspectives and are also influenced by their own emotions and opinions. For this reason alone, no objective reasonings have been or may not ever be brought forward to explain what truly caused the Witch Trials to occur.

In The Crucible Abigail Williams is the cause of the Salem Witch Trials. After she and a group of teenage girls from the town of Salem were caught dancing in the woods, the people of Salem pointed to witchcraft. Practicing witchcraft was a death sentence in the Puritan community, so Abigail felt forced to lie in order to keep the town from accusing her of dabbling in the dark arts. “I never call him! Tituba, Tituba...” (Miller 1283) said Abigail after she was questioned for calling the Devil. Rather than telling the truth and confessing to what she had done, Abigail accused others of interacting with the Devil to draw the attention to them and away from her. Given Abigail’s social

In The Crucible, the Salem Witch Trial was taking place. Everyone was accusing everyone of witchcraft left and right, leading to countless death penalties and hangings. The society in which The Crucible took place was remarkable unique. All of the citizens believed that God was speaking through government officials. So, if person A accused person B of witchcraft, the court couldn’t say that they were wrong. If the court was wrong, that meant that God was wrong. Since society during this time period was so structured in the beliefs of witchcraft, anyone could be easily manipulated. Young Abigail danced in the forest with her friends, wishing death and misfortunes on others and drank blood, which was considered witchcraft and extremely frowned upon in society, which led to the death penalty. Abigail was the only one who really committed witchcraft, but she blamed it on everyone else she possibly could in hopes that she would never get caught. When Abigail blamed the situation on Tituba, everyone immediately turned on

There have been many witch hunts throughout the course of history. A witch hunt is a search and persecution of a supposed witch. The Crucible, a play by Arthur Miller, is about the Salem Witch Trials. This was a witch hunt that took place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. People turned against each other and started accusing other people of witchcraft. A lot of innocent people were killed because of this. Witch hunts do not have to be hunts for witches. Two examples of this are the two Red Scares that took place in the USA. Although they were modern day witch hunts, they had similar characteristics with the Salem Trials.

The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, portrays a young girl named Abigail Williams as the supposed cause of the tragic events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts between 1692-1693. The question remains, is Abigail, the girl who first accused others of witchcraft, truly to blame for the execution of 20 innocent people? In a community where tensions were rising and conflict seemingly loomed in the air, calamity was inevitable. A young girl raised to live an oppressive lifestyle may have been the stimulus of the events that took place, but she cannot be held solely accountable for the actions of the court officials and other townspeople partaking in this infamous tragedy known as the Salem Witch Trials.

Who can people trust in a world filled with self-centered and ambitious enemies? Are their neighbors friends or foe? Those are questions many people faced in the seventeenth century and in the 1950s when mobocracy enveloped America. The Second Red Scare and the Salem Witch Trials were both tragic events that took place during these time periods; during this time, people were in a constant state of paranoia and fear. Many respected people lost their lives because they were accused of sinister deeds. For the Salem Witch Trial this meant being associated with witchcraft or conspiring with Satan; in the same fashion, during the Second Red Scare it meant being accused being a Communist or a spy. To make it more alarming, once accused, it was extremely difficult to get one’s name cleared because there was very little room for rebuttal against witness testimony. Many factors that caused such a frightening outcome of the Salem Witch Trials and general mobocracy include the dissension among citizens, the repressed girls of Salem and the Puritan religious beliefs.

Arthur Miller was a popular play writer during the twentieth century. He wrote plays such as: Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and All My Sons. His plays were very controversial, and he received some criticism for them. Because Arthur Miller wasn’t able to freely express what he wanted to say in his plays: The Crucible and Death of a Salesman they have deeper underlying meanings about what was happening in society during the late 40s and early 50s.

    The beginning of the play starts with Parris talking to Abigail “and what shall I say to them? That my daughter and my niece I discovered dancing heathen in the forest?” (Miller 462). Reverend saw Abigail and

The 1962 Salem witch trials occurred in Massachusetts. The Salem community was mainly composed of Puritans. In New England, Puritans had immense influence in the late seventeenth century, but their influence soon diminished due to the opening of frontier settlements. For centuries, Christians thought they were at war with witches, whom they called servants of Satan. In Europe, the execution of witches climaxed in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. However, there were multiple trials in New England prior to Salem, but only the Salem witch trials boasted such a large number of the accused and condemned. Nineteen of the thirty-six witch executions in America under the early colonial laws occurred in Salem in 1692, and it is almost certain that some witchcraft accusations were the result of economic and social strife that already existed in Salem Village. However, at the time of the play America feared the spread of communism. This is because at the end of World War II Korea split into two zones, the north, which is communist, and the south, which is democratic. Additionally to the communist North Korea, America was in a cold war with Russia, the communist power house, and enemy number one for America. During the scare, America turned to wrongful accusations and sentencing which lead to the creation of The Crucible. Therefore, in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible Salem Massachusetts forgoes vigorous witch trials and accusations that corresponds with the McCarthy trials era (Colton).

The police method called “stop and frisk” is the process of a person getting stopped and searched by a police officer in order to search the “suspect” for a weapon or anything illegal. However, this system can easily be abused for the police officer’s own benefit or beliefs. This can effectively destroy the trust between the common people and the police, as the officers can easily plant fake evidence on people they do not like. This is easily comparable to the Salem Witch Trials or The Crucible and the HUAC McCarthyism Red Scare of the 1950s. This is due to how The Crucible is written as an allegory for the Red Scare and how both The Crucible and the “stop and frisk” method are abused for personal gain.

The Salem Witch Trails were a dark period in time, where adults took the words of kids with no evidence over the accused. This time period is one of the examples of America’s Red Scare; when many innocent lives were being taken one after another over the rumors of witch craft. This became a book named The Crucibles, written by an American playwright author in 1953 named Arthur Miller. He describes the trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692-1693 time period.