1. Witchcraft Witchcraft, in various historical, anthropological, religious and mythological contexts, is the use of certain kinds of supernatural or magical powers. Witchcraft can refer to the use of such powers in order to inflict harm or damage upon members of a community or their property. Other uses of the term distinguish between bad witchcraft and good witchcraft, the latter involving the use of these powers to heal someone from bad witchcraft. The concept of witchcraft is normally treated as a cultural ideology, a means of explaining human misfortune by blaming it either on a supernatural entity or a known person in the community.

2. Fear Fear plays an important role in The Crucible. With a partner, make a two- column chart of examples of people acting from fears that are justified and fears that are irrational.

3. Mass Hysteria Defined as... the manifestation of the same or similar hysterical symptoms by more than one person. A common manifestation of mass hysteria occurs when a group of people believe they are suffering from a similar disease or ailment. Ex. USA, New York City: shortly after the Brooklyn Bridge had been opened, an unreasoning fear that the structure was on the point of collapse swept through the crowd. In the rush to get off the bridge 12 people were trampled to death, 26 seriously injured. With a partner, try to think of as many examples as you can.

4. Others Y2K Mad Cow Disease 9/11 gas frenzy Global warming?

5. MASS HYSTERIA 1692 USA, Massachusetts, Salem near Boston: witchcraft hunt hundreds were arrested and 20 died (in May of 1693 Governor Phelps ordered the release of all held on charge of witchcraft) 1933-1945 Germany: Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, 9 million people died in German-controlled concentration camps, 6 millions of them were Jews. 1978 November 18th. Jone's Town Massacre, Reverend Jim Jones had 913 members of his cult commit suicide by drinking cyanide tainted Kool-Aid. July 1518 in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, a large number of people spontaneously started dancing for days without rest over a period of one month. Most of the people ended up dying due to heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion. The plague started with one woman, in a matter of a few days that number increased to 34, and within a month to 400. To this day the cause of the mass hysteria is unknown.

6. The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic Things supposedly started innocently enough. Kashasha, near Lake Victoria in Tanzania in 1962: One girl in a boarding school there told another girl a joke. Maybe, "Have you heard the one about?" or "Take my wife, please … " Whatever the setup, the delivery, or punch line, the result was laughter. Whether it was a giggle, a guffaw, a chortle, a snort is irrelevant. The listener found it funny. But then things went dark, weird, and creepy: one girl laughed, but then so did another, and then another, and then another, and then another. After exposure, the incubation period from nothing to hysteria was short, from a few hours to a couple of days. There was no fever, no physical symptoms, just laughter and occasional crying between short moments of exhausted recuperation. When victims were restrained they sometimes became violent. No one knew what to do. The school administrators were puzzled, local doctors were confused. Trying to put a lid on the phenomena, the administrators shut the school down. But that was too little, too late: Whatever it was began to spread. It infected other schools and worked its way into the village, seemingly carried by infected students. It traveled to another village 20 miles away, and another 55 miles from Kashasha.

7. Even weirder, it wasn't a constant thing. Like little hysterical explosions, the laughter would pop up, disable small groups for days at a time, then vanish. Want to know what it was like? Well, it wasn't funny, I can tell you that: one victim in Tanganyik reported watching it spread around him, hitting one neighbor after another: giggles, guffaws, chortles, snorts – horrible, nightmarish laughter. Terrified, he retreated into his home. But then he began to feel it too, a compulsion to join in with the hideous joke. He shouted and cried and – naturally -- laughed throughout the night. The phenomena is called Mass Psychogenic Illness, more commonly known as mass hysteria, and although the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic is an extreme version, it's more common than you think. In fact what's really scary about the giggling madness that sprung from one girl's joke in Kashasha isn't that it occurred but that many researchers believe it happens so often, and is so powerful, that we simply aren't aware of it. Or rather we aren't aware how much the phenomena controls us.

8. War of the Worlds USA, 1938 On Halloween Eve 1938, a live fictional radio drama produced by Orson Welles was broadcast across much of the United States by the CBS Mercury Theatre. It depicted an invasion by Martians who had landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and soon began attacking with heat rays and poison gas. Princeton University psychologist Hadley Cantril (1940) concluded that an estimated 1.2 million listeners became excited, frightened, or disturbed.