Word: salems
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...support this thesis, the authors adopt a casebook approach. They select 14 incidents from the U.S. past, ranging chronologically from the Jamestown colony to Watergate. They show how each subject makes different demands on the historian. The Salem witch trials of 1692, for example, call for close scrutiny of a single, tiny village, while the U.S. decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima demands a broad inquiry into the dynamics of overlapping committees and bureaucracies. Finally, Davidson and Lytle show how certain historians have faced and stared down these problems...
...Atlanta's major drawback, according to Places Rated, is its crime problem-it has a murder rate "that is twice the national average for metro areas." The Washington, D.C.Maryland-Virginia area scores second in all-round desirability, though it, too, suffers from a high crime rate. Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point, N.C., is the third most livable area, largely because it scores well in most categories, with no serious drawbacks...
...fanatical, in the heat of the blaze. Then as now, Harvard's erudition and concentrated intensity alone could not insure that the leaders she nurtured and inspired would do good work in the world. Harvard men figured prominently in the conversion of enthusiasm to immoral horror that was the Salem witch trials, and students now-shivering in the same wood-paneled common rooms, watching the same inhuman blustery gusts of a Cambridge winter--may not have that much trouble imagining why The Crucible rings true...
Chris Keyser, in the crucial role of John Proctor, carries this approach vigorously to its full implications. Proctor, an upright but far from blameless Salem farmer, is tortured by the need to prove to himself and to his truly unstained wife Elizabeth that he is, in fact, a good man. As the witch trials become a raging mania in Salem, Proctor becomes inextricably involved, dragging all his past failings to light--including his liaison a year before with Abigail Williams, the girl accusing the Salem women of witchcraft--but can finally do nothing except die for his beliefs...
Take on any level, The Crucible is a play to frighten an audience senseless. Proctor may triumph morally or he may not, as the viewer must decide. But Miller holds out no hope for the other victims of Salem's madness, nor any reassuring suggestion that that madness is confined to rage amid Salem's cold, rocky farms and Puritan gowns and breeches. In the sure hands of Diekman and company, the play doesn't need Cambridge's snowstorm, or Harvard's heritage, or even Cabot's dark wood fireplace to strike close to home...