Arthur Miller's famous drama The Crucible is a well-known work on the topic of the Salem Witch Trials. Miller's play, which was written during McCarthyism and the Red Scare, is an allegory based in Massachusetts, 1690's.
The Crucible is an obvious choice in the English classroom, as it is a great choice for American drama. In the Social Studies classroom, The Crucible is a great way to talk about events of hysteria in history!
A great text that connects to this play is Margaret Attwood's poem "Half-Hanged Mary," which tells the story of Mary Webster, who was hanged for being a witch in Puritan Massachusetts. Interestingly, though...she survived the hanging and lived another 14 years!
The film version of The Crucible is also really recent and very well-done. I caution showing it mid-reading, however, because the director does take some liberties!
The Crucible is an amazing book! I read it my junior year in high school. We actually acted the whole thing out and that helped the understanding of it. This is great literature with some history background and what happened with the salem witch trials. Great idea to teach this!
ReplyDeleteI wish I had time to act the play out in class. My students are having a hard time following all the characters, and they have a hard time identifying with them as well.
ReplyDeleteI found this article to be really interesting: http://jmle.org/index.php/JMLE/article/view/121
It talks about using Twitter along with The Crucible and having students "tweet" from the POV of various characters!
This was one play that I actually enjoyed reading back in high school. We preformed parts of it in the classroom, as the drama club was putting it on stage that month as well. I wish with all of this going on though that the social studies department would have linked into it and done a lesson or two about the Salem Witch trials and how the Crucible came to be.
ReplyDeletethanks for sharing
Shannon, I wish the students had more background knowledge of the Salem Witch Trials and also of McCarthyism. If they did, I think they'd appreciate the work a lot more. I feel like as an English teacher, I can only do so much background review before reading. But if they have no prior learning to connect my background information to, it makes it that much harder for the students.
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