When The Crucible debuted on Broadway in 1953, Arthur Miller famously declared, “Salem is one of the few dramas in history with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” It’s a catchy sound bite—but what is this “end” he talks about? The collective nightmare certainly began in January 1692, when nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams erupted in unstoppable spasms, barks, and twitches; the middle of the drama reached a climax with the bodies that swung on Gallows Hill over that summer; and the final act arrived with the last trials in the spring of 1693, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony snapped awake at last, delivering not-guilty verdicts to those still on trial and pardoning the rest. By then, 19 innocent women and men had been hung and one man had been pressed to death by heavy stones.

But the trauma wrought by America’s very own “tiny reign of terror,” as Stacy Schiff describes the Salem witch trials in her new book The Witches: Salem, 1692, has no end in sight. For more than 300 years, public appetite for the topic has been insatiable—it’s as if we as a nation are doomed to tell and retell this story to each new traveler who passes by.

Each time we relive the anguish of Salem, do we expect to learn something new about ourselves? “We tend to revisit our national crack-up after miscarriages of justice,” Schiff writes. But the “witch hunt,” as the political metaphor we know today, is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. An entire chapter of the 1885 adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines is titled “The Witch-Hunt,” but there is a literalism to the term: “To-night ye will see. It is the great witch-hunt, and many will be smelt out as wizards and slain.” Several decades later, there is evidence of the phrase entering the vernacular at a 1919 congressional subcommittee hearing convened under the title “Bolshevik Propaganda.” In his testimony, Raymond Robins, who had led a Red Cross mission to Russia in 1917, said about Bolshevism, “I have faith enough in our institutions to believe that we will throw that foreign culture, born out of a foreign despotism, back out of our land, not by treating it with the method of tyranny, not by a witch hunt, nor by hysteria, but by strong, intelligent action.” He goes on, but his inquisitor cuts him off: “What do you mean by ‘witch hunt’?” he asked. “That when people get frightened at things and see bogies, then they get out witch proclamations, and mob action and all kinds of hysteria takes place,” Robins explained.

Each time we relive the anguish of Salem, do we expect to learn something new about ourselves?

The desire to understand why people hunt witches runs much deeper. Schiff reminds us that it was the Holocaust that sent historian Marion Starkey into the Salem archives. Aided by court records previously scattered throughout the North Shore of Massachusetts and assembled during the Works Progress Administration into three giant volumes, she published The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials in 1949. It offered up the first psychological portrait of the event and its characters, in particular the development of childish fantasies into teenage hysteria. It was this volume that Miller picked up to begin his research, the perfect entrance for a storyteller.

In 1952, around the time Miller’s friend, director Elia Kazan, outed eight of their creative colleagues as Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee, the disgruntled playwright traveled to the Salem library. Playing loose with Starkey’s book and the few recorded documents—altering ages, creating character composites, adding a romantic backstory—he emerged with a masterful four-act allegory for the “witch hunt.” Miller had an important goal for his play, which he wrote down in his notebook: “It must be tragic.” But instead, he was swept away by the bureaucracy of evil. The New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson, in his opening night review of The Crucible, wrote that Miller “has permitted himself to be concerned more with the technique of the witch hunt than with its humanity,” and declared it, as a drama, still in the shadow of Death of a Salesman. Note that it’s The Crucible, however, that remains Miller’s most frequently produced work. (The next Broadway revival is scheduled for spring 2016.)