Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...taken this week with respect to atomic materials and for his forthright reaffirmation of our desire for peaceful . . . relations with the Russian people," he said. But, Stevenson went on, "while he speaks of unity his colleagues sow disunity. While he calls for calm his friends light the fires of hysteria . . . Where are [Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms] today? Who speaks for them...
Soon alarming things began to happen in Salem Village. In the spring of 1692, many of the regular members of Tituba's audience developed pronounced symptoms of hysteria. Their actions can doubtless be easily explained by modern psychiatry. But to the Puritans of Salem, indeed to any seventeenth century man, these were puzzling and frightening phenomena. The most plausible explanation seemed to be that the children had been bewitched. After all, everyone know the power of the Devil and no one doubted the existence of witches. Does not the Bible say: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live...
Mather's statement, which quickly circulated in the leading circles of the colony and was published in book form within a month, broke the back of the witchcraft hysteria. Several weeks later, the court which had tried the Salem cases adjourned, never to sit again. No more executions took place in the colony of Massachusetts; the following spring, Governor Phips pardoned 150 people who had been imprisoned on witchcraft charges. The fury of the mania subsided as quickly as it had come, when Puritan good sense re-asserted itself. Soon the witchcraft trials were but an ugly memory, though Puritanism...
...necessary in wartime, but safe because of their acknowledged temporary nature. But even though peacetime infringements of civil liberties often prove more effective in bothering loyal Americans than in crimping the work of Communists skilled in evasion, they are seldom repealed and remain as a permanent monument to hysteria...
...France's Claude Debussy, Germany's Richard Wagner was "that old poisoner" of the pure wells of music. In the 1890's, fuming at the "grandiloquent hysteria" of the Wagnerian heroes-and calling his predecessor "a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn"-Debussy, singlehanded, set about creating a new anti-Wagnerian style. The result was the only opera he ever finished, Pelléas et Mélisande. Based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck, it had a shadowy, once-upon-a-time plot that actually bore a genteel resemblance to Wagner's Tristan...