Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...debonair, Freudianized study of the Salem witch trials, Marion L. Starkey analyzes the maidenly affliction as hysteria. She sees the girls as partly possessed and partly calculating, weighed down by the rigors of Calvinism, depressed by the lack of an outlet for their high spirits, and finding in their seizures a way both to draw attention to themselves and to wreak an incredibly malicious revenge on the adult world...
...eight days at Wellesley, Congregationalists debated resolutions and listened to speeches from their own and visiting churchmen. They heard New York's Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, railing against the Red-hunting temper of the times, urge that "Americans should call a halt before hysteria demands that sermons be submitted to Congressmen before delivery." They were reminded by Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr that Christians "frequently wrongly and self-righteously" blame modern ills upon secularism without confessing that "some of the achievements of democratic society are secular in origin and were attained in the teeth of Christian opposition." They passed...
...Hell. The hysteria of those days, the President went on, had subsided soon after Jefferson took office, and the country had not gone to hell after all. It was not going to hell today. The present hysteria, as he called it, was the kind of thing which happened after every great crisis and every great...
Well, where did this hysteria come from? It was true that Harry Truman could hardly be blamed for Senator Bourke Hickenlooper's wild journey through the Atomic Energy Commission files with blunderbuss and loaded innuendo. Nor could he be blamed for the House Un-American Activities Committee's crass demand for a list of textbooks from 107 colleges (which Mr. Truman dismissed with an approving reference to a Washington Post cartoon...
...actually in the grip of a Red hysteria? New York Times correspondents across the U.S. reported on the state of the public mind. Most people seemed to want Communist espionage and infiltration searched out and exposed. But they also wanted it done by due process, and without some of the loudmouthed and irresponsible accusations that had gone with...