Word: crazes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Barbecue Bonanza. Thanks largely to the kitchen craze, the appliance business, which grossed only $685 million a year prewar, is now a $5 billion giant. Stores that supply kitchen furnishings have never had it so good. Chicago's Carson Pirie Scott & Co. separated its kitchen furnishings from its appliances 18 months ago, and sales rose from $35,000 a year to $90,000. The American Rack Merchandisers' Institute announced that 1953 sales of housewares in supermarkets came to $135 million, v. $113 million a year earlier. Sales of kitchen furniture last year totaled $500 million, up 8% from...
...most worrisome in history. The box-office collapse, caused by the ever-widening spread of TV, became calamitous in 1952. By year's end the weekly audience was cut in half, and box-office receipts were down nearly 30%. Then, early in 1953, came the 3-D craze, launched in December 1952 by Arch Oboler's inept Bwana Devil, and seeming to prove that audiences would look at anything that could leap out and bite them. Cinerama, playing in only seven cities, grossed a staggering $6,000,000. But no sooner was Hollywood retooling for 3-D than...
...emerging from a period of extreme anxiety. Only a few years before, in the last years of England's ill-fated James II, the colony had lost its precious charter and had felt the weight of royal autocracy under the governorship of Sir Edmund Andros. Even as the witch craze began, Massachusetts representatives were at the court of the new King, seeking a new charter. And the memory of King Phillip's War, with its horrors of Indian savagery, was still fresh in many New England minds...
Arrest after arrest followed in the next few weeks, as the girls accused people at random during their hysterical trances. At first the victims were generally people of eccentric habits--many were not church members and the Puritan community had small sympathy for them. But as the craze spread, no one seemed safe from accusation. Even a minister, the Reverend George Burroughs, a Harvard graduate of the Class of 1670 and the former pastor of the Salem church, was seized. Soon scores of persons were under suspicion and no end was in sight. The matter became the concern...
...colony to which Mather now returned was in a turmoil over the great witch-hunt, which continued unabated; still no voice of authority had been raised against the trials. It would be pleasant to report that Increase Mather immediately flamed with indignation at the witchcraft craze, but the issue hardly seemed to rouse him at first. His long-neglected duties at Harvard absorbed his attention and he apparently saw no reason to question the verdicts of the duly-constituted authorities of the colony, men for the most part trained and educated at Harvard College...