Why the Hysteria Ended

Why the Hysteria Ended

Reason 1

Doubts grow when respected citizens are convicted and executed. -------Rebecca Nurse (jury first acquits, then told to reconsider) -------George Burroughs (recites Lord's Prayer perfectly at hanging) -------Giles Corey (81-year-old is pressed to death)

Reason 2

• Accusations of witchcraft include the powerful and well-connected. -------Wife of Governor Phips -------Mary & Philip English (and others)

Reason 3

• The educated elite of Boston pressure Gov. Phips to exclude spectral evidence. -------Rev. Samuel Willard and others -------Increase Mather points out the Devil could take the shape of an innocent person: "It were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned."

Reason 4

• Gov. Phips bars spectral evidence and disbands the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

Lessons

• What are the lessons? --------Hysteria happens. --------Children (especially) can be influenced by suggestion and peer pressure to say things that are not true. --------We should be skeptical of confessions when the confessions are the result of torture or when the person has a self-interest in confessing. --------A "cooling off period" can sometimes prevent injustices. --------Trials should be fair: evidence introduced should be reliable, witnesses should be subject to cross-examination, defendants should have legal assistance and be allowed to testify on their own behalf, and judges should be unbiased.

Lessons

• Have we had "modern-day witch hunts"? --------HUAC/McCarthy "Communist hunts" of early 1950s (events that inspired The Crucible) --------Day care abuse trials of 1980s (child witnesses, accusations multiply, people afraid to support accused, unbelievable charges, hysteria). --------Discuss modern-day events with many parallels to the Salem Trials

“’Cause they’re different than us”

• Intolerance and discrimination in the 20th and 21st Centuries

• Genocide in Sudan, Rwanda, Yugoslavia

• Cambodia• The Holocaust• Japanese Internment• Civil Rights• Equal Rights

Civil Rights

• Discrimination (unfair treatment) against African Americans

• Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968

• 1968 Pres. Johnson signs Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination

Equal Rights

• THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT• Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall

not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

• Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

• Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Japanese Internment-USA• On February 19, 1942, soon after the

beginning of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The evacuation order commenced the round-up of 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage to one of 10 internment camps—officially called "relocation centers"—in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.

• Why Were the Camps Established?• Roosevelt's executive order was

fueled by anti-Japanese sentiment among farmers who competed against Japanese labor, politicians who sided with anti-Japanese constituencies, and the general public, whose frenzy was heightened by the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. More than 2/3 of the Japanese who were interned in the spring of 1942 were citizens of the United States.

The Holocaust• The Holocaust defined• What does Webster's Dictionary define the Holocaust as? • ho·lo·caust \'hO-l&-"kost, 'hä- also -"kästor'ho-l&-kost\ noun

1 : a sacrifice consumed by fire,2 : a thorough destruction especially by fire. (i.e. a nuclear holocaust)3 a often cap. : the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II -- usually used with the b : a mass slaughter of people; especially genocide.

• The first two definitions explain the meaning of the word, the third shows that it has become a proper noun in the English language. So is that all there is to it? Of course not.

The Holocaust

• 1933-1945• 6 million Jews, 5

million others eliminated because of racism and hate

The Holocaust

• Nazi Concentration (Death) Camps• Nazi Prisoners

The Holocaust

Cambodia

• The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century.

• Ethnic struggles Buddhist Kmer vs. ethnic Vietnamese

Cambodia

Bosnia 1992-1995• In the Republic of Bosnia-

Herzegovina, conflict between the three main ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against the Muslims in Bosnia.

• Bosnia is one of several small countries that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, a multicultural country created after World War I by the victorious Western Allies. Yugoslavia was composed of ethnic and religious groups that had been historical rivals, even bitter enemies, including the Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics) and ethnic Albanians (Muslims).

Rwanda 1994

• Genocide in Rwanda - 1994 - 800,000 Deaths

• Beginning on April 6, 1994, and for the next hundred days, up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia using clubs and machetes, with as many as 10,000 killed each day.

Rwanda

Darfur, Sudan 2003

• Darfur is a region about the size of France located in Western Sudan. A little over half of the six million people who live there are black Africans while the rest are Arab. It is a region that has faced severe underdevelopment and neglect from the central government.

• In early 2003, two loosely allied rebel groups began a rebellion in Darfur, Sudan calling for the redress of social and economic grievances and demanding greater political power.

• Thus, the government decided to respond by carrying out a deliberate policy of extermination against the African tribal peoples of Darfur, Sudan from which the rebels are drawn.

Darfur, Sudan 2003

Why do we have to study this?