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According to the 1916 edition of the Roman Martyrology, Corona saw Victor being tortured for his Christian beliefs and had a vision of two crowns falling from the sky, one for him and the other for her.

Halberstadt took the title for his memoir from his first-grade history textbook, a graphic martyrology enumerating the bold deeds of youthful patriots whose bravery got them “hanged, shot, immolated, poisoned, left to freeze in the snow.”

The Law and Justice government was, he said, “vested in martyrology’’.

Still, if the author’s evenhanded effort shows more respect to John Birch than to the ideological martyrology that followed, it is remarkable that he finds it necessary to note how “all of the damage done by the likes of McCarthy and Welch paled by comparison with the massive ideological witch hunts in China under Mao.”

In 1972, for instance, he did a gallery show “with 10 paintings named after the 10 rabbis of the Yom Kippur martyrology,” he recalled.