The Pit and the Pendulum and you find an appeal to the nerves by tawdry physical affrightments." The Pit and the Pendulum "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842 in the literary annual "The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1843". The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story describes his experience of being tortured. The story is especially effective at inspiring fear in the reader because of its heavy focus on the senses, such
Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition Carey McWilliams published "Witch Hunt: The Revival of Heresy" in 1950 which was a study of the Committee of Un-American Activities in which wide use was made of the term "Inquisition" to refer to the contemporary phenomenon of anticommunist hysteria. The tenor of the work was later widened in "The American Inquisition, 1945–1960" by Cedric Belfrage and even later in 1982 with the book "Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War" by Stanley Kutler. The term "inquisition" has become so widely used that it has come to be a synonym for "official investigation, especially of a political or religious