![]() ![]() In a sense, we can't lose sight of what happened in late 17th century Salem, a small village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, because - contenting ourselves with Miller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and a few other writers, mostly of fiction - we never had an accurate view of it in the first place. ![]() To indulge in the witch-hunt metaphor now, however, would be to lose sight of the all too literal events on which it's based. (He isn't, but even if he were - well, that's another essay.) The witch hunt, exploited so memorably in Arthur Miller's The Crucible as an allegory of McCarthyism, might legitimately be used to describe to any number of the ongoing follies of our national life, from Internet bullying to anti-immigrant prejudice to the persistent speculation that President Obama is a Muslim. It's tempting to use historian Stacy Schiff's revelatory, sumptuously written new book, The Witches: Salem, 1692, as yet another occasion to apply American history's favorite metaphor. ![]()
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