Friday, March 13, 2020

Victims of mass hysteria essays

Victims of mass hysteria essays Hysteria is defined as behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess. These feelings shared by the masses causes much chaos and many people to get hurt. Throughout the years, starting in 1692 with the Salem Witch Trials through to the 20th century with the Robert Roberson Case, there have been many instances of this mass hysteria all containing similarities and differences between them. The similarity between all these cases is that no matter where the accusations took place throughout the country, all people persecuted by mass hysteria, were done so because they were different in some way. During the Salem Witch Trails people were persecuted because the other towns people believed they did not follow their god. Between 1942 and 1946 more than 120,000 Japanese natives living in the United States were placed in internment camps because a country they no longer lived in had attacked Pearl Harbor. During the McCarthy Hearings in 1954 people were blamed for not being American enough because they had different beliefs about the society they lived in. In the Robert Roberson Case a pastor and his wife were persecuted because they were accused of sexual abuse without being tried for it. All of these accused people caused change to the normalcy of the general public and because of it they were scrutinized and treated poorly. The victims of mass hysteria all had their reputations completely ruined, and every society they lived in never saw these people as they had before any accusations had ever been made. The differences in the cases are not as broad as the similarities. Although these people were persecuted because they were different they were all persecuted because of different specific reasons. In the Salem Which Trials, twenty villagers were hanged and killed because they would not lie and say they did dealings with the devil. No other group was largely and publicly punished for thei...