# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It seems inevitable this time around that the two questions to be posed will be: Is the celluloid ''Crucible'' faithful to the play? And, since McCarthyism is long gone, what, if anything, does the movie have to say to an audience edging toward the millennium?

''I can't tell you the number of people who, when they heard we were making a major movie, asked, 'Well, what about the ending?' '' Mr. Miller said one day over the summer.

Unlike ''The Scarlet Letter'' last year, with its tacked-on Hollywood ending, the cinematic ''Crucible'' (starring Winona Ryder as the young Abigail Williams, Daniel Day-Lewis as the farmer John Proctor and Joan Allen as his repressed wife, Elizabeth) is true to the story line of the stage play.

Indeed, said Mr. Miller, ''One of the most persuasive moments of the film is when you see that rope tighten around Proctor's neck. That is a message -- the fact that he went down to the end and did not relent.''

On the historical front it was generally conceded when the play was written that Mr. Miller's research was accurate. His principal changes involved fusing some characters and raising the age of John Proctor's accuser, Abigail Williams, from 11 to 17 (to accommodate Mr. Miller's story of how a sexual liaison between Abigail and John was intertwined with the accusations of witchcraft against Proctor's wife).

But even before the play was written, Mr. Miller was denounced for his metaphor. He had stopped off at the home of his friend and colleague Elia Kazan, who had directed Mr. Miller's two previous prize-winning hits, ''All My Sons'' and ''Death of a Salesman,'' and who had been subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (where he ultimately named names).

They went for a walk in the Connecticut woods and discussed Mr. Kazan's dilemma. On the one hand to be an informer was unpalatable, but on the other, as Mr. Kazan put it at the time, ''Secrecy serves the Communists.''

In his memoir ''Timebends,'' Mr. Miller wrote that he was half inside his car when Molly, Kazan's wife, ''came out and asked if I was staying at my house, half an hour away, and I said that I was on my way to Salem. She instantly understood what my destination meant, and her eyes widened in sudden apprehension and possible anger. 'You're not going to equate witches with this!' ''

Later, Mr. Kazan reported his wife's views in his own memoir, ''A Life.''

''What's going on here and now is not to be compared with the witch trials of that time,'' she said. ''Those witches did not exist. Communists do. Here and everywhere in the world. It's a false parallel. Witch hunt! The phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in government, none in the arts, none sending money from Hollywood to 12th Street.''

For me, the parallel worked. The term ''Communist'' had been so demonized that like the word ''witch'' it signified something that didn't really exist in its popular meaning. Certainly the entertainment community Communists like Mr. Kazan (and for a brief period, Mr. Miller himself, although he never fully joined the party) were not conscious agents of an international monolithic conspiracy to overthrow the Government by force and violence; they were, for the most part, do-gooders, who thought -- misguidedly, most of them later concluded -- that the Communist Party was the best agency to do something about the depression and racism at home and fascism abroad.

As it turned out, despite mixed notices for ''The Crucible,'' over the years it was to become Arthur Miller's most performed play, with productions in China (where it was seen as a comment on the interrogation techniques of the Gang of Four in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution), Poland, Britain, high schools and repertory theaters throughout the world. Now ''The Crucible'' is a $25 million motion picture, under the aegis of 20th Century Fox.

Mr. Miller has done the screenplay for the movie, and it is directed by Nicholas Hytner, who directed the highly praised ''Madness of King George'' (both play and film) and first saw ''The Crucible'' on stage as a 12-year-old schoolboy. The poetic language found in the movie is word for word the language of the play. Dolls are ''poppets,'' and even seemingly awkward grammatical syntax transports the audience back to a time and place when a man might choose to die for a principle.

Mr. Hytner worked with Mr. Miller on the screenplay and has confessed that at times he felt as if he were asking Shakespeare to tinker with ''King Lear.'' But he says the transformation of the story for the screen ''worked'' because Mr. Miller ''took it apart in a way that nobody else could have done -- this incredibly tightly constructed four-act play.''

''He was disrespectful,'' Mr. Hytner said. ''But that's because he trusted me to keep the language.''

As Mr. Hytner tells it, when he read Mr. Miller's first draft he was physically seized by it.

''As I turned the pages. I felt my heart pounding, my palms sweated,'' the director said. ''Here was an entire society seized by uncontrolled madness. I actually felt in my gut what you are supposed to feel in the presence of classic tragedy, the stirrings of pity and terror.''

Although the playwright in Mr. Miller was originally drawn to think about the political and moral pressures of the domestic cold war years, when I asked him about the applicability of the play to the here and now he said:

''I have had immense confidence in the applicability of the play to almost any time, the reason being it's dealing with a paranoid situation. But that situation doesn't depend on any particular political or sociological development. I wrote it blind to the world. The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can't get out of within. It's always on the edge of our minds that behind what we see is a nefarious plot.''

A case in point: The nationwide rash of child molestation trials in which children have charged day-care center workers with unspeakable crimes.

Indeed, Mr. Miller has already received mail pressing the analogy. I suspect it will be virtually impossible for anyone to see the close-ups of Devil-possessed children on the big screen (who ignite community panic with their accusations) and not reconsider the incredible inventory of uncorroborated allegations -- including, at their outer edge, tales of satanic cults, U.F.O. abductions and human and animal sacrifices -- in the child molestation trials.

When I asked Arthur Miller about the texture of sexuality that hovers over this latest ''Crucible,'' he said: ''I wasn't thinking in those terms, but that's an important element. The politically illicit always contains a germ of the sexually illicit.''

Perhaps Debbie Nathan is onto something when she writes in her definitive study ''Satan's Silence'' (written with Michael Snedeker) that the recent obsession with day-care centers as primary venues for the sexual abuse of children is a ''fabulous perverse displacement of the systematic societal abuse and neglect of millions of kids.''

But ''The Crucible'' isn't an answer to the ''believe the children'' mantra that plagued the child molestation juries, any more than ''Death of a Salesman'' was, as Mr. Miller once put it, a plea for better conditions for traveling salesmen. On its most universal level ''The Crucible'' is about community hysteria, fear of the unknown, the psychology of betrayal, the cast of mind that insists on absolute truth and resorts to fear and violence to assert it, and not least about the fortitude it takes to protect the innocent and resist unjust authority.

The old nativist impulse that identified the foreign with the radical and the immoral is ever present in ''The Crucible'' and speaks to a theme in American history that includes not only Salem and McCarthyism but the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Palmer raids and countless other mobilizations grand and mini -- in the face of the unfamiliar. Bill Bennett and Bob Dole see the Devil in rap music, Jesse Helms in the homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Californians, ever at the cutting edge, would exorcise illegal immigrants from their schools. There may not be any more domestic Communist menace, but ''Arab'' is in too many quarters a code word for ''terrorist.'' And gays in the military, AIDS in the blood supply, blacks in the neighborhood and political correctness (left-McCarthyism is what the neo-conservatives like to call it) -- all have provided occasions for exploitation, public hysteria and private panic.

As Mr. Miller has written, ''No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.''

In an introduction to the final screenplay, which will be published by Viking Press when the movie is released, Mr. Hytner remarks that in Puritan Salem, ''the constant press to dedicate every aspect of life to the glory of God is what lets the Devil in.''

AS I WATCHED PAUL SCOfield as the Puritan prosecutor Danforth on the screen, I was back there with him in the 1690's: ''You must understand, sir, a person is either with this Court or against it; there be no road between. This is a new time, a precise time; we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world. Now, by God's grace, the good folk and the evil entirely separate! I hope you will find your place with us.''

But as Danforth systematically went about the business of rooting out the Devil, my own first thoughts were of the Christian Right, whose fundamentalist message seems increasingly to engulf our political culture. The last time I looked, the polls showed that a majority of Americans say they ''believe'' in the Devil's existence (and 10 percent say they have communicated with him).

In his best seller, ''The New World Order,'' Pat Robertson invokes the Book of Revelation as authority for the proposition that the ''anti-Christ'' is on his way. Citing George Bush's talk of a new world order in the aftermath of the gulf war, he writes that ''Satan knows'' that ''a world government'' is just around the corner. The government is the enemy and the Christian movement is the victim.

Asked whether he agreed that today's Christian fundamentalists might be a case study in the sort of political hysteria depicted in ''The Crucible,'' Mr. Miller said, ''Fundamentalism is happening internationally'' and talked of a television clip he had seen the previous evening. ''In Israel, they're rushing through the streets trying to stop traffic on the Sabbath. The absolutist passion is an undying feeling. The fanaticism of people attacking automobiles! The isolation that the Jews were forced into feeds that. In another age it was the Catholics. It ain't going to go away!''

As Elaine Pagels, the scholarly author of ''The Origin of Satan,'' has written: ''Throughout the centuries, Christians have turned the $(New Testament Gospels'$) polemical vocabulary against a wider range of enemies. In the 16th century, for example, Martin Luther, founder of Protestant Christianity, denounced as agents of Satan all Christians who remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, all Jews who refused to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah, all who challenged the power of the landowning aristocrats by participating in the Peasants' War and all 'protestant' Christians who were not Lutheran.''

And so the final irony may well be that the movie it was thought impossible to make during the McCarthy years because it was about McCarthyism (itself a misnomer since it began long before the hapless Senator arrived on the scene) turns out not to have been about that particular social deformation at all. Rather, it was about something more universal -- fear of forces one can't understand and control.

''When something is unseen or secret or unfamiliar, you're free to project anything on it,'' observed Mr. Miller.

My spies tell me that 20th Century Fox intends to market ''The Crucible'' as a '' 'Fatal Attraction' story.'' After all, it is explained, what brings the community down is a simple case of adultery. When I first heard that, I thought, how sad, how Hollywood! Surely Mr. Miller and Mr. Hytner and their magnificent cast have given us a drama that is about more than the ''lecher'' and the ''whore,'' as Salem's vocabulary would have it.

But as I think about the sex, supernatural religion, politics and paranoia that boil and bubble in the Miller and Hytner brew, it occurs to me that ''The Crucible'' was probably destined for Hollywood all along.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It seems inevitable this time around that the two questions to be posed will be: Is the celluloid ''Crucible'' faithful to the play? And, since McCarthyism is long gone, what, if anything, does the movie have to say to an audience edging toward the millennium?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The above clip is from PBS's American Experience.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s America was overwhelmed with concerns about the threat of communism growing in Eastern Europe and China. Capitalizing on those concerns, a young Senator named Joseph McCarthy made a public accusation that more than two hundred "card-carrying" communists had infiltrated the United States government. Though eventually his accusations were proven to be untrue, and he was censured by the Senate for unbecoming conduct, his zealous campaigning ushered in one of the most repressive times in 20th-century American politics.

While the House Un-American Activities Committee had been formed in 1938 as an anti-Communist organ, McCarthy's accusations heightened the political tensions of the times. Known as McCarthyism, the paranoid hunt for infiltrators was notoriously difficult on writers and entertainers, many of whom were labeled communist sympathizers and were unable to continue working. Some had their passports taken away, while others were jailed for refusing to give the names of other communists. The trials, which were well publicized, could often destroy a career with a single unsubstantiated accusation. Among those well-known artists accused of communist sympathies or called before the committee were Dashiell Hammett, Waldo Salt, Lillian Hellman, Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin and Group Theatre members Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and Stella Adler. In all, three hundred and twenty artists were blacklisted, and for many of them this meant the end of exceptional and promising careers.

During this time there were few in the press willing to stand up against McCarthy and the anti-Communist machine. Among those few were comedian Mort Sahl, and journalist Edward R. Murrow, whose strong criticisms of McCarthy are often cited as playing an important role in his eventual removal from power. By 1954, the fervor had died down and many actors and writers were able to return to work. Though relatively short, these proceedings remain one of the most shameful moments in modern U.S. history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Arthur Miller ~ McCarthyism | American Masters | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The above clip is from PBS's American Experience . Throughout the 1940s and 1950s America was overwhelmed with concerns about the threat of communism growing in Eastern Europe and China. Capitalizing on those concerns, a young Senator named Joseph McCarthy made a public accusation that more than two hundred "card-carrying" communists had infiltrated the United States government.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address 1863 - TeacherTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
http://storiesofusa.com - Abraham Lincoln's G

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Emancipation Proclamation 1863 - TeacherTube

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Emancipation Proclamation 1863 - http://s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world’s largest library. View historic photos, maps, books and more. Contact experts for help with research. Plan a visit. Home of U.S. Copyright Office.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
a connecticut yankee in king arthur's court

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Greatest Classical Books of All Time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Over 400 classic books and novels you can read free online. The library includes the greatest books of all time, including; Moby Dick, The Call of the Wild, The Prince and the Pauper, The Red Badge of Courage, The Awakening, Little Women, The Scarlet Letter, The Secret Garden, White Fang, Babbit, Daisy Miller, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and hundreds of other classic novels.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
....This site uses HTML 4.01v; please ensure that you enable 'javascript' and that your browser is at least at version 4.
p> Bibliomania - Free Online Literature and Study Guides
Bibliomania brings you the internet's best collection of classic texts and study resources.

The fiction section has the complete, fully searchable texts of hundreds of novels.

The Poetry section has world famous poems by everyone from Blake to Keats, together with the Oxford Collected English verse and Collected French verse.

In the Drama section we have the complete works of Shakespeare, and many other plays from the Elizabethan, restoration and modern periods.

Bibliomania has created Literature Study Guides to more than 100 of the most studied texts. These will help students to get top grades, and non-students to get more out a reading of the text or a visit to a play.

Bibliomania's Reference books include Websters dictionary, Hobson Jobson, Brewer's Phrase and Fable, Soules Synonymes and many other useful books.

Our Non-Fiction section includes Das Capital, Culpepper's Herbal, and many more.

We are building a collection Biographies. Or if you are looking for Religious texts, we have the King James' Bible and The Koran.

Enjoy our books. Much more information and our a huge short story collection can be found on the frames version of Bibliomania.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bibliomania: Free Online Literature and Study Guides

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Two thousand texts of classic literature, drama, and poetry together with detailed literature study guides. Large reference book and non-fiction section