Many read and assign Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the context of American Puritanism. It is a book used to introduce students to the ideas, identity and even historical context of a group of people that inhabited the North East Coast of today’s United States almost 300 years ago, and yet that context and those characters are vessels used to express and explore a crisis that was pricked the mind of the Modern 20th Century American. The conflict of conscience that the central characters suffer is one inspired by the experiences of Arthur Miller and his creative contemporaries during what we know today as the McCarthy era or the Red Scare.
Check out this short introduction to the real context of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Enemies within: Joe McCarthy-Spreading Lies and Ruining Lives by Smithsonian Channel