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The Salem Witch Trials
A few pre-teen girls began to have “visions,” and were “seized by the Devil,” who was summoned to mess with them by… the people they didn’t like. These people were then “tried,” tortured, and, usually, burned at the stake. -
Lynching in the United States
This happened after the civil war during the reconstuction. when a african american was accused of doing something(but not convicter) they would at times be burned alive. -
The Red Scare and The Palmer Raids
Besides an abiding fear of people of color, the greatest mass hysteria in the US has been generated by fear of Communism. Any sort of collective effort by people not in power – the efforts of laboring people to form unions, for instance – has been tarred with the epithet “Communist.” -
The Second Red Scare
This was the rise of an alcoholic Senator named Joseph McCarthy after the end of WWII. To condense a long story, the Republican party was fading into insignificance after FDR and the Democrats managed to drag the country out of the Hoover/Mellon Great Depression and then engineered the US victory in WWII. -
Japanese American internment
After Pearl Harbor, xenophobia towards everything Asian spread through the US, leading to the building of a series of domestic concentration camps for the confinement of thousands of Japanes and Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast of the US
