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"Though often considered second best to his "Death of a Salesman" and opening to lukewarm, if not downright hostile, reviews, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" continues to be mounted and taught worldwide because it speaks to universal fears of social isolation and the unknown - fears especially present in a rapidly changing world, not to mention in the topsy-turvy social order of school."

"WHEN ARTHUR MILLER'S drama ''The Crucible'' first opened on Broadway in 1953, the country was in a panic about the so-called Red Menace. On Nov. 27, the first American movie of ''The Crucible'' will have its premiere. To understand why it took 43 years to make this film -- not to mention its contemporary relevance -- it pays briefly to recall the red hunt that no longer beleaguers us."

Possibly an article to use with The Crucible.

For those of you who teach The Crucible, this is a 7 minute interview with Stacy Schiff who has a new book called The Witches: Salem,1962

"During my years as an English teacher, camouflage had been easy to come by. I concentrated on 19th-century writers Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and a bit of Edgar Allan Poe. I kept their poetry safely packaged in a crate padded with literary scholarship. But paging through a copy of the New Yorker and seeing a poem by, say, Terrance Hayes left me feeling like a dog trying to use his owner's iPhone. With "The Life of a Poet," this new quarterly series sponsored by the Library of Congress, I'd committed to what felt like an act of guaranteed humiliation: interviewing the most accomplished poets in the country without having the foggiest idea what their poetry meant. In the early years, I can't claim to have attained a great deal of insight, but a funny thing happened in the crucible of my quarterly terror: I stopped reading poetry like a panicked codebreaker. That is, I stopped demanding that every poem yield its concealed meaning, which I suppose is the legacy of outmoded high school English classes. Instead I just read - often aloud - letting the words flow over me and affect me however they could."

The day after TODAY reported on the baffling case of 12 teenage girls at one school who mysteriously fell ill with Tourette's-like symptoms of tics and verbal outbursts, a doctor who is treating some of the girls has come forward to offer an explanation. Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, a neurologist in Amherst, N.Y., says the diagnosis is "conversion disorder," or mass hysteria. "It's happened before, all around the world, in different parts of the world. It's a rare phenomena. Physicians are intrigued by it," Mechtler told TODAY on Wednesday. "The bottom line is these teenagers will get better." On the show Tuesday, psychologist and TODAY contributor Dr. Gail Saltz noted that just because the girls' symptoms may be psychological in origin doesn't make them any less real or painful.

"Fifty-seven years later, Irving Adler still remembers the day he went from teacher to ex-teacher at Straubenmuller Textile High School on West 18th Street. It was the height of the Red Scare, and the nation was gripped by hysteria over loyalty and subversion. New York City's temples of learning, bursting with postwar immigrants and the first crop of baby boomers, rang with denunciations by interrogators and spies."