The word hysteria defines an exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion among a group of people. “Paranoia breeds paranoia,...” a famous quote from Arthur Miller’s essay that alludes to the use of mass hysteria that struck fear to the bourgeois of two eras that stained the face of American history. By creating and exploiting public hysteria as a means to obtain power and manipulate people as seen through the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and the McCarthy Era which lasted a little under a decade. Both calamitous events shared common factors that contributed to their beginnings as well as helping them retain momentum. First off, the Salem witch trials were a series of hangings of people accused of witchcraft in a small village in colonial Massachusetts