The Samaritans, a small ancient community, still hold a Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim, following the instructions of Exodus 12. Lambs are slaughtered, roasted and eaten after dark with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, and participants mark their foreheads with blood in memory of the Israelites' doorposts. Their Hebrew Pentateuch differs from the Jewish version in about 6,000 places, and they regard Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, as the original holy site. Photographs taken in 1917 by American Colony photographers show the ritual when the community had fallen to under two hundred people.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.