history (2)

Welcome to History Rewind Radio. Today, we're discussing the accuracy of the play "The Crucible" with special guest Tituba, the first witch accused in the Salem Witch Trials. Tituba clarifies that she never practiced voodoo or black magic, but did confess under duress. Spectral evidence was used in court, and the Crucible is deemed mostly accurate but fictionalized. The play's setting and characters are historically accurate, but some traits and events are altered. The causes of the witch trials are simplified, and fabricated events are included. Samuel Parris is accurately portrayed as escalating paranoia. Overall, the Crucible captures the themes of fear and hysteria, but has some inaccuracies. Welcome to History Rewind Radio, the show that unveils all sorts of historical events that have shaped our society today. I'm Witch Investigator Kitty, a Time Traveler from 2024, and today we will be going back in time to 1693, a few months after the Salem Witch Trials. We will be assessing the historical accuracy of the crucible with a special guest on our show today, Tituba, the first ever accused. Greetings, my name is Tituba, and I'm very honoured to be a guest on the show. I've heard that Witch Investigator Kitty has traveled back in time to talk to me about a play written from the future in 1953 called The Crucible. Yes, that's right. The Crucible is one of the most popular historical dramas, written by Arthur Miller, who dramatised the story of the Salem Witch Trials, as well as embellishing it to appeal audiences. So, the real question is, is the Crucible fact or fiction? Let's get right to it. So, in the Crucible, you're depicted leading a group of girls, including Becky and Abigail, into forest rituals. You entertain the girls with voodoo storytelling and practices of black magic. Is that accurate? No, that is not true. Even though I come from an African descent and have heard of common religious practices of it, I have never performed voodoo nor practiced black magic before. Ah, is that so? According to Miller, you confess unaddressed to communing with the devil and accuse the various townsfolk of associating with the witchcraft. Is this true? Yes. Samuel Parris beat me until I confessed. I admit that I did tell the magistrates that I had seen Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne use magic to hurt Betty and Abigail. Interesting. Spectral evidence is also mentioned in the Crucible. It corroborated the witnesses' accusations during court. Abigail uses spectral evidence to limit Mary Warren's rights in the Crucible. Was spectral evidence used? Certainly. It was used as a form of legal evidence, revealing that people saw the accused in their dreams and visions. Thank you, Tituba. It was a pleasure meeting you. We now have a deeper understanding of the inaccuracy of the Crucible. Back to the present, with the help of Tituba's analysis, the Crucible is categorized as literally accurate when comparing them to historical records. Since the Crucible was written as an allegory to McCarthyism, it was fictionalized a lot. The place and setting of the Crucible is historically accurate, being set in the Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts' Bay Colony between 1692 and 1693. This precisely accentuates the place and time where a sense of fear and confusion was prevalent at that time. Additionally, many characters in the Crucible are based on real people involved. However, some traits and motivations of characters are alternated. In this case, Abigail is portrayed as a 17-year-old man in an affair with 30-year-old John Proctor. We know that Proctor was in fact 16 and Abigail was 11. Abigail's motives are also falsely presented as someone who wanted to kill John's wife by drinking blood as part of her plan to kill her. An imposition of Tituba is that she made Abigail drink her blood, take her dreams, and entice her to sin. Fundamentally, Abigail is characterized as the instigator in the play, which in reality, it was both Betty and Abigail who started the uproar. But there's more. The simplification of the causes of the witch trials is a pivotal inaccuracy. Contextual factors contributed to the paranoia of witchcraft's suspicions in the actual events, resulting in the mass hysteria of Salem and later causing the witch trials. These included the economic and social division between Salem town and village, the political and environmental conditions of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the conflicts with indigenous Americans at that time. Another major inaccuracy is apparent in fabricated events. In the play, the child was solely caused by a group of girls dancing in the forest with Tituba. This is an example of a fabricated event, which also provides further proof of the simplified cause of witchcraft accusations that began from Betty pretending to fall sick after the forest ritual, which made people think that she was possessed by the devil. However, Paris is accurately portrayed as an individual who escalated her paranoia during 1692. This is evident because of Paris' questioning towards Abigail due to his paranoid being. He harasses Abigail and asks if they were trafficking with the devil during the forest ritual. This symbolizes the hysteria that was caused by Samuel Paris. He firmly believed in the existence of witchcraft, which encouraged him to emphasize actively on the reality of witches. He did this by delivering sermons that talked about the accused being agents of Satan. Overall, capturing the main themes of fear, paranoia, confusion, and hysteria, with most events of 1692 parallel to those in the Crucible, it is a moderately accurate representation of the Salem witch hunts on a historical scale, as it has some false and simplified events. So, that's it for today! What a journey! Thank you everyone for joining us today on History Rewind with you. Be sure to keep your witch hunt on! Until next time!