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Salem Witch Trials

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 29, 2023 | Original: November 4, 2011

The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months.

By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?: Context & Origins

Belief in the supernatural—and specifically in the devil’s practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty—had emerged in Europe as early as the 14th century, and was widespread in colonial New England . In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts ) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem).

Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents’ suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

Did you know? In an effort to explain by scientific means the strange afflictions suffered by those "bewitched" Salem residents in 1692, a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms.

In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott and Mary Warren.

In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris’ Caribbean slave, Tituba, along with two other women—the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn—whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

Salem Witch Trial Victims: How the Hysteria Spread

The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain conviction by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches acting alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans.

As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse—both regarded as upstanding members of church and community—and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good.

Like Tituba, several accused “witches” confessed and named still others, and the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hathorne, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were hanged that July; five in August and eight more in September. In addition, seven other accused witches died in jail, while the elderly Giles Corey (Martha’s husband) was pressed to death by stones after he refused to enter a plea at his arraignment.

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy

Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence (or testimony about dreams and visions), his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College (and Cotton’s father) later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that “It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned.”

Amid waning public support for the trials, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with dwindling intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.

In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711.

Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play “The Crucible” (1953), using them as an allegory for the anti-Communist “witch hunts” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. A memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials was dedicated on August 5, 1992 by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

HISTORY Vault: Salem Witch Trials

Experts dissect the facts—and the enduring mysteries—surrounding the courtroom trials of suspected witches in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692.

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Salem Witch Trials — the Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692

February 1692–May 1693

The Salem Witch Trials are a series of well-known investigations, court proceedings, and prosecutions that took place in Salem, Massachusetts over the course of 1692 and 1693.

This illustration by Howard Pyle depicts one of the accusers pointing at the accused and saying, “There is a flock of yellow birds around her head.” It is an example of the spectral evidence that was permitted at the trials. Image Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections .

Salem Witch Trials Summary

The Salem Witch Trials took place in colonial Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693 when people living in and around the town of Salem, Massachusetts were accused of practicing witchcraft or dealing with the Devil. The accusations were initially made by two young girls in the early part of the year.

By May, William Phips had been named Governor of Massachusetts and a new charter had been implemented. Initially, Phips responded to the accusations by setting up a special court — the Court of Oyer and Terminer — to hear the cases and to determine the fate of the accused.

Unfortunately, the court was controversial because they allowed “spectral” evidence — visions of ghosts, demons, and the Devil — to be entered into the proceedings. It seemed to fuel the hysteria, which was likely elevated by King William’s War, which was going on in New England at the same time.

By the fall, 19 men and women had been convicted and hanged, and another was pressed to death . Another man died from having heavy stones placed on him. Somewhere between 150 and 200 were in prison or had spent time in prison.

Governor Phips ended the special court in October after accusations were made against well-respected members of the community. In January 1693, the trials resumed, but under the Supreme Court of Judicature. Spectral evidence was not allowed, and most of the accused were found innocent of the witchcraft charges and released.

A handful of the people accused of witchcraft were convicted, but Governor Phips intervened in May 1693 and agreed to release them as long as they paid a fine. By the time the proceedings ended, it was the largest outbreak of witchcraft in Colonial America .

Examination of a Witch, Salem Witch Trials, Matteson

Salem Witch Trials Facts

Facts about the accusers in the salem witch trials.

Two young girls, Elizabeth Paris and Abigail Williams started to act in a strange manner, which included making strange noises and hiding from their parents and other adults.

Elizabeth Paris, known as Betty, was 9 years old. Her father was the Reverend Samuel Paris.

Abigail Williams was 11 years old. Reverend Paris was her uncle.

More young girls in Salem Village started to show similar symptoms, including 12-year-old Anne Putnam and 17-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard.

Facts About the Accused in the Salem Witch Trials

The first people accused of witchcraft were Tituba, an enslaved woman, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne.

Dorothy Good was the youngest person to be accused of witchcraft. She was 4 years old.

Facts About the Role and Testimony of Tituba in the Salem Witch Trials

Tituba is believed to be an enslaved woman from Central America, possibly from Barbados.

She lived in the home of Reverend Paris and had been taken to Massachusetts by Paris in 1680.

Tituba confessed to using witchcraft.

She testified that four women, including Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good, along with a man, had told her to hurt the children.

Her testimony convinced the people of Salem Village that witchcraft was rampant in the town.

Facts About People Convicted and Executed During the Salem Witch Trials

The first person to be executed was Bridget Bishop.

Over the course of the Salem Witch Trials, 19 people were hanged at Proctor’s Ledge, near Gallows Hill.

Another one of the accused, Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea before the court and was ordered to be pressed to death. He was laid down on the ground and had heavy boards placed on top of him. Then heavy rocks were set on the boards until he was crushed by the weight.

The charges against all victims of the Salem Witch Trials were eventually cleared.

The Special Court

The Court of Oyer and Terminer was the special court ordered to oversee the trials, as ordered by Governor William Phips.

Salem Witch Trials Significance

The Salem Witch Trials were important because they showed how quickly accusations and hysteria could spread through Colonial America. At the time, the Witch Trials also threatened the authority and stability of the new charter and government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, while King William’s War raged across New England and Acadia .

Salem Witch Trials APUSH — Notes and Study Guide

Use the following links and videos to study the Salem Witch Trials, King Willilam’s War, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the AP US History Exam. Also, be sure to look at our Guide to the AP US History Exam .

Salem Witch Trials APUSH Definition

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions that occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. The trials were a dark chapter in American history, characterized by mass hysteria and accusations of witchcraft. Numerous individuals, predominantly women, were accused of practicing witchcraft, leading to the execution of 20 people — 13 women and 7 men. The trials were fueled by social, religious, and political factors, partially driven by King William’s War, resulting in tragic consequences for the victims and their families.

Salem Witch Trials Video for APUSH Notes

This video from the Daily Bellringer provides a detailed look at the Salem Witch Trials.

Salem Witch Trials APUSH Terms and Definitions

William Phips — William Phips was the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Salem Witch Trials. He played a significant role in bringing an end to the trials by dissolving the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which was responsible for the majority of the convictions. Phips was concerned about the growing public skepticism and criticism surrounding the trials, prompting him to take decisive action and promote a more rational approach to handling alleged witches. He was also worried about the public perception the trials had, during a time of war.

Court of Oyer and Terminer — The Court of Oyer and Terminer was a special court established in 1692 to handle the cases of alleged witches in Salem and surrounding areas. The court was led by several judges, including William Stoughton, and it operated under a unique legal process that allowed spectral evidence, or testimonies of dreams and visions, to be admitted as valid evidence. This, along with other factors, contributed to a biased and unjust environment during the trials.

William Stoughton — William Stoughton was a prominent judge and the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. He presided over the Court of Oyer and Terminer during the Salem Witch Trials. He played a pivotal role in the harsh convictions and sentencing of numerous accused individuals. His unwavering support for spectral evidence and his lack of leniency exacerbated the severity of the trials’ outcomes. After Phips dismissed the cases, Stoughton worked to have him removed as Governor.

Samuel Paris — Reverend Samuel Paris was the minister of Salem Village and one of the central figures in the initial events that sparked the witch trials. He was the father of Elizabeth Paris and the uncle of Abigail Williams, two young girls who experienced mysterious fits and claimed to be afflicted by witchcraft. His role as a religious authority and his support for the accusations fueled the hysteria, contributing to the escalation of the trials.

Elizabeth Paris — Elizabeth Paris was the nine-year-old daughter of Samuel Paris and one of the first accusers in the Salem Witch Trials. With her cousin Abigail Williams, she exhibited peculiar behaviors, including seizures and strange utterances, which were attributed to witchcraft. Their accusations against various individuals, especially Tituba, were instrumental in initiating the investigations and subsequent arrests.

Abigail Williams — Abigail Williams, the eleven-year-old cousin of Elizabeth Paris, was another crucial accuser during the Salem Witch Trials. Like her cousin, she displayed symptoms of bewitchment and was among the first to accuse others, leading to a chain reaction of allegations.

Anne Putnam — Anne Putnam was a teenage girl from Salem Village who actively participated in the trials as an accuser. She made numerous accusations against various individuals, contributing to the mounting hysteria. Her motivations for involvement remain a topic of historical debate, with some suggesting that personal grievances and religious fervor influenced her actions.

Tituba — Tituba was an enslaved woman from the Caribbean who worked in the household of Reverend Samuel Paris. She became one of the first individuals accused of practicing witchcraft after Elizabeth and Abigail accused her of bewitching them. Tituba’s origin and cultural differences contributed to her status as an outsider in Salem, making her an easy target for accusations. Under pressure, she confessed to being a witch and provided testimonies that increased the intensity of the trials.

Bridget Bishop — Bridget Bishop was the first person to be tried and executed during the Salem Witch Trials. She was known for her unconventional lifestyle and had been accused of witchcraft once before.

John Proctor — John Proctor was a respected farmer in Salem Village and one of the central figures in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” which was based on the events of the witch trials. Proctor was accused of witchcraft after he spoke out against the proceedings, expressing skepticism about the legitimacy of the trials. His refusal to falsely confess and his unwavering integrity ultimately led to his tragic execution.

Giles Corey — Giles Corey was an elderly farmer who became entangled in the witch trials when his wife, Martha Corey, was accused of witchcraft. In a notable act of protest against the unjust proceedings, Corey refused to enter a plea in court, leading to a brutal form of punishment known as pressing. Corey died during the punishment.

King William’s War — King William’s War was a conflict between England and France that occurred from 1689 to 1697, overlapping with the time of the Salem Witch Trials. The war was part of a larger conflict known as the Nine Years’ War or the War of the Grand Alliance. Its impact on the region, including heightened tensions and security concerns, likely contributed to the climate of fear and paranoia in Salem, potentially influencing the outbreak of the witch trials.

Salem Witch Trials — Primary and Secondary Sources

The Witchcraft Delusion of 1692 by Thomas Hutchinson , William Frederick Poole, and Richard Frothingham
The Wonders of the Invisible World : Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed in New-England by Cotton Mather
Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts, Infallible Proofs of Guilt in Such as are Accused with the Crime by Increase Mather
Written by Randal Rust

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Article contents

The salem witch trials.

Abram C. Van Engen Abram C. Van Engen Washington University in St. Louis
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.139
Published online: 22 November 2016

The Salem witch trials have gripped American imaginations ever since they occurred in 1692. At the end of the 17th century, after years of mostly resisting witch hunts and witch trial prosecutions, Puritans in New England suddenly found themselves facing a conspiracy of witches in a war against Satan and his minions. What caused this conflict to erupt? Or rather, what caused Puritans to think of themselves as engaged, at that moment, in such a cosmic battle? These are some of the mysteries that the Salem witch trials have left behind, taken up and explored not just by each new history of the event but also by the literary imaginations of many American writers.

The primary explanations of Salem set the crisis within the context of larger developments in Puritan society. Though such developments could be traced to the beginning of Puritan settlement in New England, most commentators focus on shifts occurring near the end of the century. This was a period of intense economic change, with new markets emerging and new ways of making money. It was also a time when British imperial interests were on the rise, tightening and expanding an empire that had, at times, been somewhat loosely held together. In the midst of those expansions, British colonists and settlers faced numerous wars on their frontiers, especially in northern New England against French Catholics and their Wabanaki allies. Finally, New England underwent, resented, and sometimes resisted intense shifts in government policy as a result of the changing monarchy in London. Under James II, Massachusetts Bay lost its original charter, which had upheld the Puritan way for over fifty years. A new government imposed royal rule and religious tolerance. With the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution, the Massachusetts Bay government carried on with no official charter or authority from 1689 until 1691. When a new charter arrived during the midst of the Salem witch hunt, it did not restore all the privileges, positions, or policies of the original “New England Way,” and many lamented what they had lost. In other words, in 1692, New England faced economic, political, and religious uncertainty while suffering from several devastating battles on its northern frontier. All of these factors have been used to explain Salem.

When Governor William Phips finally halted the trials, nineteen had been executed, five had died in prison, and one man had been pressed to death for refusing to speak. Protests began almost immediately with the first examinations of the accused, and by the time the trials ended, almost all agreed that something had gone terribly wrong. Even so, the population could not necessarily agree on an explanation for what had occurred. Publishing any talk of the trials was prohibited, but that ban was quickly broken. Since 1695, interpretations have rolled from the presses, and American literature—in poems, plays, and novels—has attempted to make its own sense and use of what one scholar calls the mysterious and terrifying “specter of Salem.”

witch-hunting
New England
17th century
cultural memory

What Happened in Salem

The fits began in January 1692 . Betty Parris, the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, and Abigail Williams, the minister’s eleven-year-old niece, were the first to be afflicted. As members of the minister’s household, they presented an embarrassing situation. The fits suggested that Satan could make his way even into the pastor’s house, possessing or demonizing beyond the minister’s ability to protect or defend. Moreover, Puritan theology taught that such afflictions usually came as chastisements from God, requiring the minister, Samuel Parris, to examine his ways and repent. Either because of his embarrassment or because he genuinely repented, Parris did not suspect witches for many weeks. He prayed. He fasted. He waited. After more than a month of continued fits, he finally called a doctor. When the doctor pronounced the girls bewitched, it both relieved a burden and added a new one. The girls were not possessed; they were attacked. But who the devil was bewitching them?

Mary Sibley, Parris’s neighbor, knew one way to find out. She ordered Parris’s slaves Tituba and John Indian to bake a witch cake—a rye bread mixed with urine from the afflicted children. This was called white magic, or countermagic, and it was long used and widely practiced in Puritan New England. Though uniformly condemned by the clergy (they believed all magic, for whatever purpose, worked only through the power of Satan), the practice of countermagic continued through the 17th and 18th centuries. Lay people did not necessarily associate magic with the devil, but approached it more pragmatically: if it healed it was good, and if it harmed it was bad.

The witch cake Sibley ordered apparently worked. When the dog ate it, the children identified their tormenters. It also produced collateral damage, however, for the same day the witch cake was baked, two more children fell ill: twelve-year-old Ann Putnam Jr., and seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard, the doctor’s maid. The four girls collectively named three witches, and Samuel Parris had good reason to be relieved. Now, finally, he could lay the blame elsewhere. Not only were these witches the ones at work, but Sibley’s condemned usage of countermagic had “raised the devil” in Salem. He rebuked Sibley and forced her to confess before the church. Then he used the evidence she procured through countermagic to begin proceedings against the witches.

The first suspects were the predictable ones: Tituba, a slave from the West Indies; Sarah Good, a poor beggar who offended everyone; and Sarah Osborne, a bedridden widow who had scandalized the town by marrying her servant. 1 As many have shown, witch hunts were often directed primarily at women, and especially at poor, marginalized women or those who had transgressed social norms. As Carol Karlsen succinctly writes: “The story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women … Especially in its Western incarnation, witchcraft confronts us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society, and with women themselves. It confronts us too with systematic violence against women.” 2 Salem thus began as a limited witch hunt aimed at notorious women, a ritual that was not very common in New England compared to Europe, but one which certainly had its precedents. The community would purge itself of those who did not fit, and then it would reunite through the process of uncovering and overcoming the devil. 3 The local magistrates, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Bartholomew Gedney, presided over the first phase of examinations. Beginning with Sarah Good, Hathorne interrogated the defendants in an attempt to force confessions. Questions led with an assumption of guilt. Rather than asking whether Good injured the four children, Hathorne simply asked why she did. Good claimed her innocence, and each denial of guilt evoked a series of fits from the four afflicted girls. Finally, Good accused Osborne, attempting to shift the blame, but when the magistrates examined Osborne, much the same occurred.

It was when the court finally heard from Tituba that Salem exploded into an unprecedented affair. Under Hathorne’s pressure, Tituba confessed to being a witch, and that confession yielded several dramatic results. First, the afflictions of the girls ceased, confirming that confessions were the best way both to prevent further harm to the girls and to legitimate the actions of the court. Second, Tituba’s confession enabled her to detail the actions of other witches, her supposed accomplices. According to the trusted Puritan theologian William Perkins, a confessed witch who accused others offered valid testimony against them. Tituba explained that Good and Osborne had forced her to harm the girls, and the court believed her. Third, Tituba offered several elements in her confession—all guided by Judge Hathorne—that would become routine in future confessions: the devil’s book, the witches’ meetings, the description of a “black man,” Satanic masses, and the naming of other suspects. 4 Finally, and most significantly, Tituba claimed that Good and Osborne did not act alone. Tituba eventually testified to a total of nine witches, though she could not say who they were. Suddenly, a full witch conspiracy was underway, a war of Satan against the Puritan churches of New England. To survive, the godly would have to unmask their foes. 5

Ann Putnam Jr., took the lead in identifying these other witches, who turned out not to conform to the usual stereotypes. The next accused included Dorothy Good, Sarah’s four-year-old daughter; Martha Cory, a member of Samuel Parris’s church; and Rebecca Nurse, a widely respected matriarch, member of the nearby Salem Town church, and godly grandmother in the community. Meanwhile, the afflicted multiplied. Adults began to suffer fits, including Ann’s mother and Tituba’s husband, John Indian, and the fits spread to Mary Warren, the servant of John and Elizabeth Proctor. John Proctor responded by beating her, which seemed to cure her of the problem, and apparently he proclaimed that if he were left alone with John Indian, he could beat the devil out of him as well. But when Mary recovered and turned against the afflicted, the afflicted turned against her: she was soon accused of witchcraft herself, revealing in its early days how difficult it would be to oppose the supposedly bewitched. 6 Before the judges, Mary claimed that “the afflicted persons did but dissemble.” Fits immediately ensued, so convincing in their performance that Mary reacted with fits of her own and was taken back to prison, unable to speak. In court the next day, Mary confessed to signing the devil’s book, but only because she had been tricked into doing it by the Proctors. Then she accused Giles Cory. She rejoined the ranks of the afflicted and spun out accusations in tandem with them, saving her own life but costing the lives of many more.

With the confession of Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield, who would also soon join the afflicted, the trials turned their attention to Maine. Hobbs claimed to have become a witch in the woods of Casco Bay. All along the Maine frontier, the English Puritans were losing in a long war against the French and their Wabanaki allies. Wabanaki raids repeatedly wiped out Puritan towns, and several of the afflicted girls were orphans and refugees from the conflict. With Maine’s woes now present in the courtroom, accusations focused on the former Salem minister who had moved back to that frontier: George Burroughs. Burroughs was a Puritan minister with Baptist leanings who had preached in the divided Salem Village church a decade before; he had a reputation for mistreating wives and an uncanny ability to survive Indian raids. Both aspects made him suspect. At Salem, he became identified as the ringleader of the conspiracy, the minister of an inverted covenant of witches. He presided over black masses and bloody sacraments. He killed wives. He bewitched neighbors. He recruited the formerly godly to war against New England. When the court took up his case, more than thirty witnesses volunteered to damn him.

Until June, the examinations of the accused witches had not been able to proceed to actual trials because the colony lacked an official charter and an ability to try capital offenses. In June, the newly appointed governor, William Phips, arrived from England with a new charter, heard about the crisis in Salem, and immediately established a Court of Oyer and Terminer (“to hear and determine”). Stocked with high-ranking officials from Boston, this court could move from the initial depositions, testimonials, and examinations to grand jury indictments and finally jury trials. The court first tried Bridget Bishop on June 2. Bishop denied her guilt, which would prove a good way to die in Salem. The trial proceeded quickly, and on June 10, she was hanged.

At that point, Salem paused. Accusations and examinations had swept up a series of accused witches, mostly from Salem Village and its immediate vicinity. But now it had executed its first witch, a woman who disconcertingly refused to confess even on the scaffold. Before proceeding, the magistrates wanted some approval from Puritan ministers. Asked for their thoughts on the matter, several prominent ministers took two days to respond. Their response, “The Return of Several Ministers,” suggested caution, especially in the use of “spectral evidence” (seeing someone’s specter, or shape, harming either oneself or another). The strange use of spectral evidence—the claims of the afflicted to see, experience, know, and testify about the invisible world, along with the court’s reliance on such testimony to suspect, convict, and execute the accused—would become one of Salem’s most anomalous mysteries. The judges at Salem approached spectral evidence in direct violation of precedent and principle. Yet although “The Return of Several Ministers” urged caution in this regard, it did not overtly condemn the proceedings or the judges and ended by encouraging a “vigorous prosecution.” It was all the court wanted to hear. Ignoring all other ambiguities and cautions, the court pressed on, turning its attention in a second phase of trials from Salem Village to the nearby town of Andover, where a great number of accused persons quickly confessed—many doing so explicitly to save their lives. 7

The suffering of the accused did not begin with that first hanging of Bridget Bishop. It began rather with the accusation itself, the taint of dark magic and ungodly ways, the loss of reputation. For those like Rebecca Nurse, who was a church member, the suffering continued with an official excommunication before execution. And suffering extended elsewhere as well, to the forfeiture of property and constrained conditions for surviving children, and to the prisons, which were wretched, unsanitary, overcrowded, and dangerous. The first to die at Salem was not Bridget Bishop but Sarah Osborne, the bedridden widow, who perished in jail a month before her case could even be heard. In total, nineteen would be executed, one man would be pressed to death between boards, and at least five would die in jail before Governor Phips, under growing opposition, would finally close down the Court of Oyer and Terminer—much to the dismay and indignation of its presiding judge, William Stoughton. Phips created another court to hear the remaining cases, and this second court cleared the jails, refused to accept former confessions, and acquitted all but three. Governor Phips immediately reprieved the convicted three. No one else would die for witchcraft in New England.

Explanations of the Salem Witch Trials

Most scholars agree on the basic narrative of the Salem witch trials. 8 Why it happened, however, is far from clear. Disagreements abound, with alternative explanations for the afflicted, the accused, the judges, the ministers, the magistrates, and the proceedings as a whole. Much about Salem begs for explanation. Not only was the witch hunt larger and more extensive than anything New England had ever seen, but those in authority acted quite differently than had their colleagues in prior cases. Young girls and others had fallen into fits and afflictions before; in fact, almost simultaneously with Salem, the same kinds of fits with the same sorts of accusations were beginning among a small group of girls in Hartford, Connecticut. Yet neither in neighboring Hartford in 1692 nor in the previous six decades did such afflictions lead to stuffed jails and mass executions.

No one has better laid out the full culture of witchcraft in Puritan New England than John Demos, and in the updated version of his book Entertaining Satan , Demos emphasizes two fundamental “themes”: that witchcraft in New England belonged to “the regular business of life in pre-modern times”—a part of the basic functioning of community—and that witchcraft was “a profoundly ‘emotional’ phenomenon (with fear and anger at its center, and lots of affect-laden fantasy flowing out in all directions).” 9 Yet Demos focuses on sporadic witch accusations and trials across New England, not massive witch hunts, and he offers no account of Salem. At Salem, something beyond the regular business of life broke out. What made Salem go so wrong?

Three prominent and overlapping explanations have come to the fore, each emphasizing a particular aspect. One early and influential account laid all the blame on economic development and communal division. In Salem Possessed , Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum saw Salem Village at war with forces of modernization that threatened a close-knit, traditional agricultural society. Mapping the houses of the afflicted against the houses of the accused, they found that most of the afflicted came from the western, more agricultural areas of Salem Village, while the accused tended to come from the eastern, more merchant-oriented society of Salem Town. From this map and other evidence, Boyer and Nissenbaum claimed that the coming of modern capitalism caused irreparable harm to the self-understanding and social fabric of the community, leading to a witch hunt. The cause of the Salem witch hunt was finally the economy, along with all the social factors that economic division and development entails. 10

A second major interpretation puts the primary emphasis on political instability. In 1684 , King James II revoked the colony’s founding charter and imposed a new government with a royally appointed governor named Edmond Andros. Andros was everything the Puritans hated: an autocratic, aristocratic Anglican who ignored the locals’ opinions and advice. When the Glorious Revolution occurred in 1689 , replacing James II with William and Mary, Massachusetts’s colonists jailed Andros and packed him off to England. From 1689 through 1691 , the colony had no charter and thus no official government. During this interim, it returned to the administration of the first charter, waiting for the outcome of negotiations between Increase Mather and the new king and queen. The new charter, which arrived in the midst of the Salem panic, mixed features of the first and second governments. Returning many rights to the Massachusetts citizens, it nonetheless retained a royally appointed governor and still required religious tolerance. Many opposed the charter, and some began to wonder if Puritan New England had run its course. This political instability, some have argued, caused the witch hunt. Salem can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a Puritan New England ideal that was constantly under attack during hated, missing, or compromised governmental charters. 11

Finally, others have seen a similar mentality at work, but from a different cause: New England was under attack, but much more literally. In King William’s War ( 1688–1697 ), New England suffered devastating defeats at the hands of the French and Indians along its northern border. Almost every attempt to mount a counteroffensive failed miserably. Towns were razed, casualties mounted, and captives were taken north and forced into Catholicism. In the guise of his minions, Satan wanted to destroy the godly community, and because of New England’s sins, God was allowing Satan to succeed. No one would be safe without a thoroughgoing reformation. Closer to Salem, these northern wars touched the lives of several participants in the witch hunt: some of the afflicted were war refugees, orphaned and traumatized; some of the accused, especially George Burroughs, had close ties to Maine; and some of the judges were responsible for terrible defeats and financial losses during the wars. Hunting witches allowed the judges to fight Satan on their own turf and win; and for the afflicted—several of whom may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—Salem might have made them feel that someone was finally taking up their cause. 12

Each of these explanations has been used to make sense of Salem, and all have been found wanting. 13 More recently, scholars have emphasized the role of religion in accounts that combine features from all previous explanations. Even before Mary Beth Norton highlighted the wars of the northern frontier, Richard Godbeer noted them and combined them with several additional factors that served as “a series of external forces assault[ing] the colonists, imperiling not only their integrity as a political and spiritual community but even their very survival.” This “common trauma,” he noted, was often described in the language of invasion and external threat. 14 In Satan and Salem , Benjamin Ray similarly argues that “far from being precipitated by a single key person or circumstance, the Salem crisis was the result of a perfect storm of factors.” 15 That storm of factors, he explains, shared a common language of Satan’s attack. Likewise, Emerson Baker, publishing the same year as Ray, titled his comprehensive account of the crisis A Storm of Witchcraft . This idea of a perfect “storm” emphasizes the coming together of multiple factors. King William’s War certainly matters, as Norton demonstrates; but so do other factors, such as economic instability, the lack of a stable government, the inexperience of a new governor, the past failings of ruling magistrates, and the personalities of Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and many others. Overall, it seems, what mattered most was that New England Puritans, in the midst of these crises—and partly as a result of them—saw themselves as God’s chosen people at war with a newly unleashed and angered Satan. It was a war they wanted to win, and the most self-assured Puritans became convinced that they could win this war by purging the land of all those who allied themselves with Satan and Satan’s cause. They came to see the devil anywhere, and they sought to defeat him everywhere.

The Many Participants in the Salem Witch Trials

Beyond attempting to explain why Salem happened at all, scholars have also sought to examine the particular mysteries of the various groups involved: the afflicted, the accused, the magistrates, and the ministers. These groups often have defining characteristics, though they also divide into their own subgroups (local magistrates vs. Boston magistrates, for example, or the ministers in support of the trials vs. the ministers who opposed them). In addition, there are several individuals who significantly affected Salem: Samuel Parris, the town’s minister; Tituba, the minister’s slave who first confessed; Thomas Putnam Jr., the man whose family seemed particularly afflicted and whose depositions were especially successful against the accused; Governor Phips, who supported the trials, then closed them down, then tried to claim that he never knew what was happening; Increase Mather and his son Cotton, the prominent Boston ministers who divided over Salem while trying to make it appear as though they actually agreed. These personalities and groups have all received their own attention as important factors at Salem.

Salem begins with the afflicted: there are no trials without the seizures, screams, and fits. These afflictions began with young girls who would remain the core group of the afflicted, but they spread to a host of others, including males and adults (such as John Indian and Ann Putnam, Sr.). What explains the bewitched? A variety of notions have been advanced, and the only one consistently refuted has been the one that dominates popular imagination: ergot poisoning. According to this idea, the afflicted consumed a fungus that grows on moldy rye bread, causing symptoms similar to those of LSD. All scholars rule out this possibility. Much more likely is that the girls simply faked it. The very evidence that rules out ergot poisoning—the intervals of affliction, the lack of serious harm to the afflicted, and the idea that these afflictions seemed to be able to start and stop on command—suggests the possibility of fraud. All scholars agree that at least some fraud was involved, and certain members of the afflicted group, such as Mary Warren, seem particularly suspect. The Proctors’ servant ceased having fits, faced an accusation of witchcraft, became “afflicted” all over again, then laid the blame on the Proctors. Such survival strategies seem to indicate clear cases of fraud. 16

At the same time, the kinds of stress Mary endured could cause mental breakdowns that might blur the lines between fraud, fatigue, and fear. If friends, family members, respected ministers, and magistrates all believe that you are tormented by specters, at what point do you begin to believe them? So, too, hysteria can be contagious. Is it fraud to fall when others fall, or fear when others fear? Such lines can sometimes be hard to draw. As Emerson Baker usefully points out, cases of contagious fear, anxiety, and hysteria have broken out in modern times as well, even as recently as 2011 in New York public schools amid teenage girls who suffered symptoms quite similar to those of Salem. 17 The afflictions at Salem may have begun as genuine symptoms of anxiety or PTSD; at court, these fits might have continued as fraud, especially when the magistrates required repeat performances of affliction to convict the accused. 18

As for the accused, how did their names come to the afflicted? The first three names make sense: they fit the usual description of witches. But once witchcraft expanded to church members and Puritan ministers, does any rationale explain how one person came to be accused while another person escaped? Theories abound, beginning primarily with the economic disparities proposed in Salem Possessed , but most recent scholarship settles on the idea of religious division within the community. When the witch hunt began in Salem Village, the afflicted came primarily from families who supported Samuel Parris, and the accused came primarily from families who opposed him. As the witch hunt passed on from Salem Village to surrounding communities, accusers seemed to seek out those who were religiously corrupt in some way—those who failed to attend church regularly, who did not participate in sacraments, who failed to become full members of a church, or who had some kind of connection to Quakers, Baptists, or other religious dissidents. This religious rationale does not explain all accusations, but it seems to make the most sense of identifying the accused.

When the accused stood before the court, they came into the presence of another influential group: the judges. It is one thing for young girls to become afflicted and accuse others of witchcraft; it is quite another for court magistrates to believe them and to prosecute almost every name they produced. Recently, attention has turned from the local antagonisms of the afflicted and the accused to the role of the judges and magistrates who seemed to push the trials forward. As Baker has written, “[N]o one would have died without the sanction of the judges. The judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer hold the answers to many of Salem’s riddles.” 19 These judges have become all the more interesting lately because scholarship has demonstrated just how oddly they behaved. At Salem, magistrates disregarded both precedent and advice. In the previous sixty years of Puritan settlement, there had been sixty-one prosecutions for witchcraft, with at most sixteen convictions and executions, a rate of 26.2 percent. 20 For many years, Puritan magistrates and ministers had prevented the conviction and killing of supposed witches, in part because they had a different understanding of witchcraft than did most commoners. The elite defined the deed as a covenant with the devil; most of the non-elite saw it as a harmful use of magic. Common citizens brought their testimony of harm to magistrates, but harm in itself proved nothing. Successful prosecutions required either a confession or two witnesses to confirm that someone had made a pact with the devil. For sixty years, confessions were hard to come by and pacts with the devil were hard to prove. More important, in the previous several decades of Puritan New England, ministers and magistrates were decidedly uneasy about spectral evidence; it could identify a potential suspect , but it could never be used to convict. At Salem, spectral evidence convicted. It was relied upon as insight into the unknown, as valid testimony of the invisible world. The changed use of spectral evidence would be one of the strangest and most unsettling aspects of Salem, one that informs the work of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and an element that scholars continue trying to explain. 21 But spectral evidence was not the only anomaly. New England law had previously limited accusations of witchcraft and other crimes by requiring the posting of a bond; in order to curtail frivolous cases, people had to pay money in order to lodge a case with the court. At Salem, that requirement was dropped. As a result of the conditions surrounding witchcraft before Salem, not only were there fewer complaints made in previous decades, but those complaints were far less successfully prosecuted. For sixty years, commoners and lay people had pressed for the conviction of witches, and for just as many years their political and religious superiors had pressed back even harder. 22

At Salem, all of these precedents would be ignored or reversed. Bonds were not required for many months, swelling the number of complaints. Confessions, some of which were produced by illegal torture, saved the lives of those who confessed. Those doomed by their denials of guilt, meanwhile, were often convicted almost exclusively on the basis of spectral evidence. As the accused protested their innocence, the afflicted girls would fall, twist, scream and writhe, pointing to an invisible tormenter. Since all could see the torment itself, two witnesses of witchcraft were not required—assuming, that is, that one could trust the spectral evidence. The court ignored the tomes on witchcraft that previous courts so carefully studied. Rather than tamping down and resisting the common people’s desire for prosecution, the magistrates at Salem accepted and encouraged it. Where the conviction rate hovered just above 26 percent in previous decades, the rate at Salem would be 100 percent. 23 No one who came to trial would be acquitted. As one scholar aptly explains, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for whatever motives, the Salem judges wanted convictions.” 24

Why did the judges want convictions? Political instability may offer some psychological rationale for the behavior of court judges: several of them had worked for Andros’s hated government, and some had been involved in the defeats of King William’s War. Perhaps these judges needed a way to prove they were on the side of godly Puritans, while also finding a conspiracy of witches to be a handy excuse for their failures. 25 Religious tensions and perhaps a sense of spiritual unworthiness among these second-generation stalwart Puritans may also play a role: five of the nine judges had attended Harvard College in preparation for the ministry, but all had abandoned that path for other pursuits. In addition, as Baker reveals, these judges were mostly related to each other through marriage. The only unrelated judge was Nathaniel Saltonstall, and Saltonstall was the only judge to resign from the court in protest. 26 Yet it is important to realize that all the judges seemed to have been transformed at Salem: several had been involved previously in acquitting accused witches, questioning the spectral evidence they would come to rely upon at Salem. Why they suddenly sought convictions is difficult to determine, but if the judges had not so desperately wanted the prosecution to succeed, the witch hunt could never have taken off. For whatever reason, the magistrates must have had a great deal to gain in 1692 .

While the judges may have suffered from paranoia and guilt about the wars or their involvement in Andros’s government, on a more local level, the afflicted, their parents, and the prosecutors all seemed to dwell in a paranoid, anxious, and traumatized community. The records of the Salem witch trials are an endless testimony of suffering. Loss, despair, anxiety, and sorrow pour out of the testimonies. 27 And all of that heartache could finally be given an object, a scapegoat—someone to blame. Without witchcraft, all these losses would register as afflictions requiring repentance; but with witches to blame, the guilt could be alleviated. Rather than losing children because of one’s sins, such losses could be understood as Satan’s attack, possibly launched against someone precisely because that person had remained faithful to God. Witches, in other words, changed the dynamics and experience of loss.

That may not have been the explicit rationale for many witnesses, but it certainly seems to have guided the thinking of Samuel Parris. Parris, the embattled minister whose children started throwing themselves at open flames, was the fourth pastor of Salem Village. The first three had short tenures, invited by one faction but opposed by another. Few had their salaries paid; all would leave Salem for less than stellar careers; and one, George Burroughs, would be hanged as a witch. Salem Village offered one of the lowest ministerial salaries in the entire colony, and its reputation of bitter factional divisions preceded it. In 1689 , no one with an actual divinity degree could be lured to its parish. Samuel Parris had completed three years at Harvard before leaving to take over his father’s plantation in Barbados, which quickly failed. He tried his hand as a merchant in Boston and failed there, too. Finally, Salem Village asked him to preach. For a year, he wrangled about the terms of his salary, his wood supply, and the ownership of the parsonage. In his first sermon, he demanded that congregants love, serve, and obey him. He told them that by bringing sacraments to the church (allowed for the first time since it was established), he was removing the Lord’s reproach. Then he removed the Halfway Covenant that allowed God-fearing congregants who were not full members to baptize their children. These “halfway” congregants, whom Parris railed against, would either have to become full members by making a profession of faith before the church and undergoing the church’s scrutiny, or they would have to forgo baptizing their children. It was clear from the start that Samuel Parris would not heal this divided church.

The trouble with Parris seems especially evident from his preaching. Parris spoke unambiguously of the good and the bad, the godly and the ungodly, assigning “halfway” God-fearing congregants consistently to the latter category. As scholars have shown, Parris posed no neutral ground: all people were either of God or the devil, and his goal was to parse and separate. 28 Lacking the hesitation and self-doubt of many other Puritan ministers, Samuel Parris often presented himself as a Christ-like figure opposed by anti-Christian forces. From the moment he first began preaching, Parris spoke of cosmic battles. He emphasized Satan’s attack against the godly and interpreted resistance as the diabolical plot of the devil. On the Sunday before the first fits began in his home, Parris preached explicitly that Satan was attempting to “pull down” the church. Frequently, the concerned faction supporting Parris met at his house to discuss the crisis facing the church, strategizing how to deal with all those who opposed him. It makes sense, then, that his house is where the fits began. Without Parris, there would be no context for believing the testimony of the minister’s slave that a conspiracy of witches gathered outside his home and sought to overthrow his church. 29

But Parris was not the only Puritan to see Satan at work, gathering forces for a violent battle against godly New England. Nowhere does this perception of war appear more clearly than in the introductory frame of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World ( 1693 ). Written at the behest of the governor, deputy governor, and chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials, this text chooses five cases, selectively presents the evidence, and defends the court in its work for Christ. The overall defense of the court’s actions lay in the broader context the book establishes: “The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories,” Cotton Mather explains. Because they brought the gospel to Satan’s lands, Satan had become especially enraged and now pursued a grand plot to destroy the godly society that the Puritans had built. Like Samuel Parris, Cotton Mather’s book couched the Salem witch trials within the context of a cosmic battle.

Governor Phips liked that account of things. He sent Wonders of the Invisible World to London as the official history of Salem and prohibited anyone else from publishing on the subject once the trials ended. But the very need to silence opposition proved how few agreed with Cotton Mather. Resistance started mounting immediately, propelled by the case of Rebecca Nurse; during her examination, more than three dozen citizens signed a petition proclaiming her innocence and defending her good character. Petitions continued to grow during the trials, with more and more brave persons signing documents attempting to save the lives of their neighbors. No petition worked. Yet the rising cry of protest did finally have an effect, bringing the noise of opposition and resistance to those who held the most power in the colony. Soon Increase Mather joined the protests, publishing his own account of Salem while the trials were underway. In Cases of Conscience , Increase specifically delegitimized the court’s use of spectral evidence, undercutting the primary source of convictions. That book, along with the protests of several leading Boston ministers, finally convinced Governor Phips to stop the trials.

The trips to Salem by Increase and Cotton Mather reveal their different mentalities. When Cotton Mather went to Salem, he witnessed a group execution that included the supposed “King of Hell,” George Burroughs. At the scaffold, Burroughs composed himself with so much calm and seeming godliness, including a perfect recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (thought impossible for a witch), that many in the crowd began to turn against the executions. Burroughs looked more like a Protestant saint from the pages of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs than like a satanic wizard bent on the destruction of Christianity. 30 As the crowd started to protest, Cotton Mather mounted a horse and convinced the crowd that the devil often appeared as an angel of light, winning them back to the executions, which then continued.

Yet that line of thinking—that the devil might appear as an angel of light—could also damn the very trials it was meant to support. In fact, such an idea served Increase Mather’s argument rejecting spectral evidence. If the devil could appear in any shape, then perhaps the devil had taken the shape of someone innocent. Crying out against specters might be playing right into the devil’s hands. When Increase Mather traveled to Salem, therefore, he did not go to encourage the executions; instead, he visited the jails and spoke with the accused, including many who had confessed. There he learned about the extreme pressures applied to them and found that many had confessed because they believed it would save their lives. While talking with them, he witnessed the suffering of innocent persons in terrible, sickening jails, and he turned against the trials for good. When Increase returned home, he wrote the book that would help bring them to a close.

The mysteries of Salem are many, various, and difficult to solve. Why were these people afflicted? Why were those people accused? What explains the motivations and behavior of Samuel Parris, and how much was Parris’s temperament able to set the terms that enabled the tragedy to occur? Why did the judges reverse decades of precedent in an effort to convict and execute as many as they could? And how did the ministers respond? Who supported the trials, who opposed them, and why? These kinds of questions have produced contested answers, all attempting to balance the relative weight of importance behind each actor or cause. Salem is filled with questions. And while extensive records survive, those records seldom offer answers able to settle all disputes.

Reading and Remembering the Salem Witch Trials

The abiding mystery of Salem seems one reason for its enduring legacy. Governor Phips attempted to ban any discussion of Salem, but within three years that ban was violated, and no future silencing could take place. Thomas Maule, a Quaker, was the first to challenge the official proscription, with Truth Held Forth and Maintained in 1695 . The book had a long chapter criticizing the government for its handling of Salem. It was burned and Maule was arrested, spending several months in prison before facing many of the same judges and prosecutors he had attacked. Yet Maule stood by what he wrote. First, he defended its claims; then, slyly, he argued that his authorship could not be proven: anyone could have put his name on the title page. The grand jury found him not guilty, and the ban was broken. From that moment forward, critiques and reassessments of Salem have poured from the presses. 31

Yet many of these skeptical voices were not so clear about what exactly had happened: mistakes were made, to be sure, but the precise nature of those errors could not be determined. The minister John Hale, for example, who was first an advocate and later a skeptic at Salem, explained, “Such was the darkness of the day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents [i.e., precedents], that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.” 32 Apologies eventually appeared from many involved, including the jury foreman, the afflicted girl Ann Putnam Jr., and the judge Samuel Sewall, who desired “to take the blame and shame of it.” 33 Yet most of these apologies came in Hale’s variety; they were, for the most part, apologies of the confused. Something had gone wrong, but who was to blame? In 1706 , Ann Putnam Jr., now twenty-nine, desired “to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness from God and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence.” But she did not say she faked her afflictions. Instead, she explained, “[I]t was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time.” 34

The darkness of Salem often seems the aspect most remembered today. In popular histories, the Puritans usually appear as stock figures of backward superstition—hateful, unenlightened religious bigots who saw witches in every shadow and enjoyed nothing so much as a good hanging. 35 As Gretchen Adams has shown, such accounts of Salem emerged most prominently in the nation’s first schoolbooks, when American historians praised their country for its moral progress. 36 Yet many have demonstrated that such an assessment fails to fit the evidence: after all, many of those involved at Salem welcomed the new sciences emerging in Europe. Some were among the most intelligent and advanced figures of their day. Cotton Mather, for example, would become the first New Englander inducted into the British Royal Society, and his work promoting smallpox inoculation in later years would save far more lives than Salem lost. As Sarah Rivett has carefully demonstrated, the way in which Puritans approached evidence and testimony during the Salem witch trials—even and especially spectral evidence—was inflected through their embrace of empiricism. “Rather than a symbol of a fading occult worldview,” Rivett writes, “the devil in Salem represented a phase of an emerging Enlightenment modernity.” Against popular histories that caricature the Puritans as premodern, irrational religious fanatics, Rivett writes simply and convincingly: “Irrationality does not suffice as an adequate explanation of Salem.” 37

Still, something seemed to change at Salem—or rather, Salem seemed to demonstrate that something drastic had already shifted. The Salem witch trials have been presented in various ways as the end of Puritan New England. Perhaps Salem helped usher in a new age of religious skepticism, though belief in witchcraft persisted. More important, the relationship of state to church seemed to change. As Ray writes, “[N]ever again would the state ask the church for advice.” 38 But Salem seemed to happen in part because the magistrates disregarded the ministers’ advice, while at the same time still feeling compelled to ask for it. The ministers, too, seemed to recognize their weakening authority in their ambiguous responses and their inability (at least in most cases) to confront the magistrates openly. 39 This deepening divide between magistrates and ministers suggests not only that the Salem witch crisis caused the breakdown of Puritan New England, but that it also resulted in part from the ministers’ loss of authority.

Histories of the Salem witch trials begin with the records of the trials, and those documents raise their own sorts of questions. Secondhand accounts from several witnesses survive, along with confessions, petitions, and many of the preparatory documents for trial (such as depositions, indictments, and examinations), but the records of the actual trials before the Court of Oyer and Terminer have gone missing. In addition, the record book of the Salem Village Church does not contain the crucial years. Beyond a catalogue of what exists or not, we also have to take into consideration who did the recording, an aspect of the records made newly available by the extraordinary 2009 edition Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt . We know now, for example, that Thomas Putnam Jr., recorded (or “authored”) a great many depositions and testimonials—more than 120, amounting to more than one-third of the total number. Thomas Putnam and his extended family (including his afflicted wife, daughter, and servant) would account for 160 accusations and the prosecution of fifty-eight people, one-third of the total number accused and arrested. Moreover, Putnam’s ability to write or record these documents proved the power of his pen: his depositions were unusually successful. 40

The question of who wrote what and how documents were stylized, as well as questions of language and genre, shape our understanding of the surviving records and accounts. For example, Thomas Putnam has been noted for his use of stock phrases. Ray points out that the phrase “most grievously” appears 172 times in his descriptions of the suffering of the afflicted, while the phrases “grievously tortured” and “grievously tormented” appear forty-five times. 41 Was the use of such phrases responsible for Putnam’s strong results, and what does that tell us about the power of narrative or the expectations of audience during the Salem witch trials? As scholars have also highlighted, Putnam particularly loved to involve the heart. The depositions he “recorded” would often have an afflicted person saying: “I verily believe in my heart that [so-and-so] is a witch.” 42 These details about Putnam’s writings open the door to larger examinations of language and its effects. What stock phrases worked, and what made them work? Who else was involved in writing records, and how did their styles differ? Literary analysis could yield fresh results about how to read the records of the Salem witch trials.

Those fresh readings would be bolstered by two related approaches: borderlands studies and performance studies. For many years now, literary scholars have asked how to read and understand the texts produced at the meeting of two cultures. In particular, a methodology inflected by the concept of the “borderlands” offers ways of reading against the grain, helping, for instance, to locate Native American actors and Native American voices in texts written almost exclusively by Europeans. In the case of the Salem records we have a similar situation: How do we understand the actions and the voices of the accused in records written almost exclusively by the prosecution? How do we read the Salem witch trial records against the grain? It has always been known that the prosecution wrote most of the records that survive, but only recently have we learned just how much they were composed by particular individuals, such as Thomas Putnam Jr. With that understanding, we can now ask in new ways how to read what he and others produced. Performance studies could also open Salem with its rich theoretical understanding of “performance” and identity. Many have likened the Salem court to a stage. In fact, the spectacle of Salem, which brought together the afflicted, the accused, and the public, not only went against advice and precedent—previously, judges were urged to separate all parties and keep the afflicted individuals apart—it also provided the evidence later used to convict the accused. The spectral torments witnessed and performed during examinations became the basis of conviction. Performance studies thus has much to teach us about how to read Salem.

Beyond the actual events at Salem and their surviving records, there is also the remembering and remaking of Salem that has occurred ever since. Each generation has written its own account of Salem, though that writing proliferated in the wake of expanding education requirements and the new schoolbooks written to meet demand beginning in the early 1800s. In attempts to give the new nation a history and a tradition, Salem was invoked as a moral lesson: it represented the dark parts of the colonial past that the new United States had left behind. Novels, plays, and poetry dwelt on the tragedy as well. The first literary treatment of the trials, according to Gretchen Adams, was the 1817 epic poem The Sorceress, or Salem Delivered by Jonathan Scott. But as Adams explains, “By midcentury many notable nineteenth-century literary figures, including New England natives John Neal, John William De Forest, John Greenleaf Whittier, and of course Nathaniel Hawthorne produced major novels using the witchcraft trials as significant plot elements.” 43

As Adams indicates, perhaps the most famous author to wrestle with Salem was Nathaniel Hawthorne, a descendant of Judge Hathorne who added the “w” to his name in order to distinguish himself from his ancestor. Salem lies at the heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables as well as several short stories, especially “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “Young Goodman Brown.” In the short stories, Hawthorne dwells on the problem of spectral evidence. According to Michael Colacurcio, the link between the two tales told at Salem Gallows Hill in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” is that “both concern the Puritan problem of ‘specter evidence,’” in each case pointing readers to perceive “the truth of specter evidence as guilty projection”: that is, “in both cases the charges of diabolical evil probably reveals more about the accuser than the accused,” and such tendencies continue beyond a superstitious past. 44 The same concern with spectral evidence frames “Young Goodman Brown,” but here the question has changed to take up an issue from the trials themselves: if the devil can take any shape, and if those shapes were being used to identify the accused, then could the devil be trusted? In other words, and more deeply, how could one gain adequate knowledge of the invisible world and the true constitution of one’s neighbors and fellow church members? As Colacurcio aptly summarizes, the problem identified in “Young Goodman Brown” is that “the difficulty of detecting a witch is distressingly similar to the radically Puritan problem of discovering a saint.” And if one cannot adequately or accurately do either, then the Puritan experiment itself will fail. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne essentially claims that Salem revealed the fundamental flaw in Puritanism: the inability to discover the invisible through the visible, to judge the status of another’s soul through visible practice or deed. As Colacurcio puts it, “Ultimately, evidence fails.” 45

Meanwhile, some 19th-century literary treatments of Salem turned to the tragedy for a homegrown American sensationalism, lending Gothic features to American fiction. This was certainly the case with John Neal’s novel Rachel Dyer ( 1828 ) and, in more nuanced ways, it continued with Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables . Lawrence Buell analyzes such works as what he calls “provincial Gothic,” meaning “the use of Gothic conventions to anatomize the pathology of regional culture.” 46 In his account of this Gothic trend and its appeal, Buell gives one of the best summaries of how and why Salem made its way into the literary imagination of the nation and the nation’s writers in the 19th century. He writes, “We owe the fact that the Salem delusion is the best-known episode of early New England history next to the voyage of the Mayflower largely to Hawthorne and fellow gothicizers of his era, to whom witchcraft appealed … for a mixture of reasons: as an opportunity for proxy war against religious conservatives, as that instance from the regional past that resonated most strongly with the supernaturalism of traditional Gothic, and as a proof that New England culture was not so humdrum as early national critics had feared.” 47 But the appeal of Salem was not limited to the provincial Gothic; it also provides the plot and setting of several works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As Chadwick Hansen showed long ago, Longfellow’s play Giles Cory of Salem Farms , written in the wake of the Civil War, was the first account to transform Tituba into a half-black slave. 48 After Longfellow, others metamorphosed Tituba fully into an African American and finally into an African who was kidnapped as a child, even though nothing in the existing records lends support to such a claim and most scholars reject it. Tituba is one of many characters who has received her own rewritings through the years, including in the more recent and well-received novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem ( 1986 ) by Maryse Condé, which won the French Grand Prix award for women’s literature and was translated into English in 1992 .

As Condé’s novel reveals, the cultural memory and literary imagination of Salem lives on. During the Cold War, for example, Arthur Miller famously turned to Salem for a model that would lay bare the persecutions of supposed communists and subversives led by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Here again, the primary problem was one of evidence: What counts as a clear indication of either patriotism or subversion, a good soul or a soul bent against the common good? The evidence would prove “spectral” in its own way, and Miller found Salem to be a good site for showing why. As The Crucible continues being regularly performed, joined by ever fresher retellings and reimaginings, the cultural memory and function of Salem seems rich for even further exploration. While individual readings of particular literary usages abound (especially for Hawthorne), no specifically literary history of Salem exists—no study of its changing shape and operation in plays, poems, and fiction from 1817 to the present day. What does Salem do for us, and why do certain accounts of Salem predominate over others? Popular understandings of the event often emphasize the girls’ fortune-telling practices, Tituba’s “voodoo” spells, and ergot poisoning—all theories invented after the Civil War and all rejected by most scholars. Yet the tales live on. What do such stories do for the cultural memory of Salem that more accurate, scholarly accounts fail to accomplish? More generally, why do Americans keep remembering, reliving, and remaking Salem? What need does it meet?

However Salem is approached or remembered, it is clear that scholars and the general public will keep grappling with what happened there in 1692 . The Salem witch trials have formed one of the cornerstone cultural memories of American history, a turning point from Puritan New England to a province more aligned with British imperial interests. How much actually changed as a result of the trials is open to question, and scholars have offered a wide variety of answers. Some have even tried to link the trials to the eventual coming of the American Revolution, though such approaches seem rather shaky at best. Nonetheless, all agree that something changed, or that the tragedy came about because of deep shifts in the culture and control of Puritan New England. The significance of Salem lies in the meaning and perception of that change, along with all the possible explanations for why and how it occurred. Yet for all the answers proposed, the enduring legacy of the witch trials arises primarily from the persistent aura of mystery that surround them—this tragic event erupting against precedent and probability, supported and opposed by people at every level of society and in every station of life, spun out of control by eager magistrates and frightened girls, resulting in a massive injustice that New England would reckon with for many years, and that Americans would be haunted by ever since.

Select Primary Sources

Calef, Robert . More Wonders of the Invisible World . Salem, 1700. Reprint, Breinigsville, PA: Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2011.
Hall, David D. Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1693 . 2d ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.
Mather, Cotton . Wonders of the Invisible World (London, 1693). Reprint, Lincoln, NB: Zea Books, 2011.
Mather, Increase . Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (Boston, 1693) .
Rosenthal, Bernard , ed. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project .

Select Literary Sources

Condé, Maryse . I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem . Translated by Richard Philcox . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
de Forest, John William . Witching Times . New York: Putnam’s Magazine, 1856.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . The House of the Seven Gables . Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1851.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835). Reprint in Complete Short Stories (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1959), and other collections.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . “Young Goodman Brown” (1846). Reprint in Complete Short Stories (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1959), and other collections.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth . “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms.” In The New England Tragedies , by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
Miller, Arthur . The Crucible . New York: Viking, 1951.

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?

Looking into the underlying causes of the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century.

In February 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony town of Salem Village found itself at the center of a notorious case of mass hysteria: eight young women accused their neighbors of witchcraft. Trials ensued and, when the episode concluded in May 1693, fourteen women, five men, and two dogs had been executed for their supposed supernatural crimes.

The Salem witch trials occupy a unique place in our collective history. The mystery around the hysteria and miscarriage of justice continue to inspire new critiques, most recently with the recent release of The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Pulitzer Prize-winning Stacy Schiff.

But what caused the mass hysteria, false accusations, and lapses in due process? Scholars have attempted to answer these questions with a variety of economic and physiological theories.

The economic theories of the Salem events tend to be two-fold: the first attributes the witchcraft trials to an economic downturn caused by a “little ice age” that lasted from 1550-1800; the second cites socioeconomic issues in Salem itself.

Emily Oster posits that the “little ice age” caused economic deterioration and food shortages that led to anti-witch fervor in communities in both the United States and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Temperatures began to drop at the beginning of the fourteenth century, with the coldest periods occurring from 1680 to 1730. The economic hardships and slowdown of population growth could have caused widespread scapegoating which, during this period, manifested itself as persecution of so-called witches, due to the widely accepted belief that “witches existed, were capable of causing physical harm to others and could control natural forces.”

Salem Village, where the witchcraft accusations began, was an agrarian, poorer counterpart to the neighboring Salem Town, which was populated by wealthy merchants. According to the oft-cited book Salem Possessed by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Village was being torn apart by two opposing groups–largely agrarian townsfolk to the west and more business-minded villagers to the east, closer to the Town. “What was going on was not simply a personal quarrel, an economic dispute, or even a struggle for power, but a mortal conflict involving the very nature of the community itself. The fundamental issue was not who was to control the Village, but what its essential character was to be.” In a retrospective look at their book for a 2008 William and Mary Quarterly Forum , Boyer and Nissenbaum explain that as tensions between the two groups unfolded, “they followed deeply etched factional fault lines that, in turn, were influenced by anxieties and by differing levels of engagement with and access to the political and commercial opportunities unfolding in Salem Town.” As a result of increasing hostility, western villagers accused eastern neighbors of witchcraft.

But some critics including Benjamin C. Ray have called Boyer and Nissenbaum’s socio-economic theory into question . For one thing –the map they were using has been called into question. He writes: “A review of the court records shows that the Boyer and Nissenbaum map is, in fact, highly interpretive and considerably incomplete.” Ray goes on:

Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaum’s conclusions in Salem Possessed, geo graphic analysis of the accusations in the village shows there was no significant villagewide east-west division between accusers and accused in 1692. Nor was there an east-west divide between households of different economic status.

On the other hand, the physiological theories for the mass hysteria and witchcraft accusations include both fungus poisoning and undiagnosed encephalitis.

Linnda Caporael argues that the girls suffered from convulsive ergotism, a condition caused by ergot, a type of fungus, found in rye and other grains. It produces hallucinatory, LSD-like effects in the afflicted and can cause victims to suffer from vertigo, crawling sensations on the skin, extremity tingling, headaches, hallucinations, and seizure-like muscle contractions. Rye was the most prevalent grain grown in the Massachusetts area at the time, and the damp climate and long storage period could have led to an ergot infestation of the grains.

One of the more controversial theories states that the girls suffered from an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica , an inflammation of the brain spread by insects and birds. Symptoms include fever, headaches, lethargy, double vision, abnormal eye movements, neck rigidity, behavioral changes, and tremors. In her 1999 book, A Fever in Salem , Laurie Winn Carlson argues that in the winter of 1691 and spring of 1692, some of the accusers exhibited these symptoms, and that a doctor had been called in to treat the girls. He couldn’t find an underlying physical cause, and therefore concluded that they suffered from possession by witchcraft, a common diagnoses of unseen conditions at the time.

The controversies surrounding the accusations, trials, and executions in Salem, 1692, continue to fascinate historians and we continue to ask why, in a society that should have known better, did this happen? Economic and physiological causes aside, the Salem witchcraft trials continue to act as a parable of caution against extremism in judicial processes.

Editor’s note: This post was edited to clarify that Salem Village was where the accusations began, not where the trials took place.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Salem Witch Trials — The Complex Conflicts of the Salem Witch Trials

The Complex Conflicts of The Salem Witch Trials

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Religious, Social and Psychological Conflicts

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Understanding the Salem Witch Trials

Engraving of a witchcraft trial at Salem Village. The central figure in this 1876 illustration of the courtroom is usually identified as Mary Walcott.

Wikimedia Commons

Salem, Massachusetts in 1691 was the home of a Puritan community with a strict moral code. In addition to the difficulties of farming in a harsh climate with rough terrain, Salem faced economic and political unrest. In this community, a group of girls accused an Indian slave named Tituba of witchcraft. Tituba confessed under pressure from court officials, and her confession ignited a hunt for witches that left 19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to death, and over 150 more people in prison awaiting a trial. In this lesson, students will explore the characteristics of the Puritan community in Salem, learn about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and try to understand how and why this event occurred.

Guiding Questions

What was life like in Puritan New England?

What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?

To what extent do the historic records show that the accused were innocent until proven guilty?

Learning Objectives

Describe cultural practices of the majority in Puritan New England.

Create a timeline of the events of the Salem Witch Trials.

Analyze multiple interpretations of the Salem Witch Trials.

Construct a position on whether the trials were justified.

Lesson Plan Details

Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s faced a number of serious challenges to a peaceful social fabric. Salem was divided into a prosperous town and a farming village. The villagers, in turn, were split into factions that fiercely debated whether to seek ecclesiastical and political independence from the town. In 1689 the villagers won the right to establish their own church and chose the Reverend Samuel Parris, a former merchant, as their minister. His rigid ways and seemingly boundless demands for compensation increased the already present friction. Many villagers vowed to drive Parris out, and they stopped contributing to his salary in October 1691.

These local concerns only compounded the severe social stresses that had already been affecting New England for two decades. A 1675 conflict with the Indians known as King Philip's War had resulted in more deaths relative to the size of the population than any other war in American history. A decade later, in 1685, King James II's government revoked the Massachusetts charter. A new royally-appointed governor, Sir Edmund Andros, sought to unite New England, New York, and New Jersey into a single Dominion of New England. He tried to abolish elected colonial assemblies, restrict town meetings, and impose direct control over militia appointments, and permitted the first public celebration of Christmas in Massachusetts, a celebration of which Puritans strongly disapproved. After William III replaced James II as King of England in 1689, Andros's government was overthrown, but Massachusetts was required to eliminate religious qualifications for voting and to extend religious toleration to sects such as the Quakers. The late seventeenth century also saw a increase in the number of black slaves in New England, which further unsettled the existing social order.

In February 1692, Betty Parris, Reverend Parris's daughter, as well as her friends Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam, became ill with symptoms that doctors could not diagnose, including fits and delirium. Dr. Griggs, who attended to the "afflicted" girls, suggested that they might be bewitched. Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and Mary Warren later claimed affliction as well.

Prodded by Parris and others, the girls named their tormentors: Sarah Good, a poor woman; Sarah Osbourn, an elderly woman; and Tituba, a slave who had told them stories involving Vudou beliefs. The women were tried for witchcraft - Good and Osbourn claimed innocence, and Tituba confessed. Tituba's detailed confession included a claim that there were several undiscovered witches who wanted to destroy the community. This caused a witch-hunting rampage: 19 men and women were hanged, one man was pressed to death, and over 150 more people were imprisoned, awaiting trial.

On September 22, 1692, the last eight alleged witches were hanged. On October 8, 1692, Governor Phipps ordered that spectral evidence (when someone claimed to witness a person's spirit in a separate location from that same person's physical body) could no longer be admitted in witchcraft trials. On October 29, 1692 Phipps prohibited further arrests and released many accused witches. The remaining alleged witches were pardoned by May 1693. The hangings of witches in 1692 were the last such hangings in America.

For more information, see the following EDSITEment-reviewed websites:

Digital History: The Salem Witch Scare
Tituba Biography

NCSS. D1.1.6-8. Explain how a question represents key ideas in the field.

NCSS.D2.His.1.6-8. Analyze connections among events and developments in broader historical contexts.

NCSS.D2.His.2.6-8. Classify series of historical events and developments as examples of change and/or continuity.

NCSS.D2.His.3.6-8. Use questions generated about individuals and groups to analyze why they, and the developments they shaped, are seen as historically significant.

NCSS.D2.His.4.6-8. Analyze multiple factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras.

NCSS.D2.His.5.6-8. Explain how and why perspectives of people have changed over time.

Review the lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and other useful websites. Download and print out documents you will use and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing.
Students can access the primary source materials and some of the activity materials via the EDSITEment LaunchPad .
Familiarize yourself with the Salem Witch Trials. For an overview, consult Digital History . For more detailed information, consult Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive .
If you plan to have students create pictures, or if you want to use larger sized paper for your students' timelines, be sure to have those materials handy.
Though each reading activity provides questions for discussion for the readings, teachers may wish to spend a few minutes with students asking introductory questions to help distill what they have read.

Activity 1. Life in Puritan New England

Separate the class into four groups, and assign each group one section of the EDSITEment Study Activity under the label Understanding Puritan New England . Offer them the following instructions, and suggest that they distribute the reading evenly and return to discuss the questions after 10–15 minutes of reading. Instructors might also consider assigning this reading the night before as homework.

Instructions for students: Just as the society around us shapes the way we think and act, so did it shape the people of Salem, Massachusetts in the 1600s. Look at the websites listed below, and, on a separate sheet of paper, answer the questions about life in Puritan New England. Note that many of the websites contain interactive images. Click on the images to open them, and mouse-over the image to discover more about it.

The Puritans

The Puritan Idea of the Covenant

New Groups: A Great Migration
Working: "To 1 day work at my house"
Beliefs: A City upon a Hill
What values that we now consider 'American' were contributed by the Puritans?
In the 1920s, how did people remember the Puritans? Define the word 'caricature' and explain how it relates to the Puritans.
To what extent did Puritans condemn alcohol consumption, artistic beauty, and poetry?
What did the Puritans believe was the primary purpose of government?
What did the Puritans think about the separation of church and state?
What is a 'separatist'? Were the Puritans 'separatists'? If not, describe their philosophy regarding the Church of England.
What is a 'covenant'? Explain the function of 'covenants' in the way the Puritans saw the world.
Did Puritans believe in tightly knit communities and families, or did they value families that were dispersed?
Describe some reasons why Puritans came to America from Europe.
What were some of the strategies New England colonists used to deal with the labor shortage?
Describe some of the religious beliefs of the Puritans.
Gender Roles: Beliefs and Gender Roles
Education: Print and Protestantism
Customs: Possessions Reveal Social Standing
Getting Things: Importing Status
Child Life: Fleeting Mortality
Look up the word 'Patriarchal' in the dictionary. Define what it means, in your own words.
What were some of the responsibilities of men in the 1700s in Colonial New England? What were some of the responsibilities of women?
Explain how the story of Adam and Eve was used to perpetuate prevailing ideas about men and women.
Were schools important in New England? Did people know how to read?
Were there as many schools in other parts of America as there were in New England?
Did wealthy people tend to spend a lot of money? What are some of the things you think they would buy?
What does 'conspicuous consumption' mean?
Why did so many children die at young ages in colonial New England?

Group Three

The Land 1680–1720
Agriculture: Agriculture and Community
Public Space: The Meeting House
According to your reading, what did most Europeans think of the North American Landscape?
What were some early colonial industries?
What was the center of public and religious life in New England?
Describe the common field system.
What were some results of European fences, mills, grass, and livestock being brought to New England?
Explain how a mill worked.
What were the criteria that a committee would use to "seat" the meetinghouse?
Who was allowed to vote? What did they vote on?

Ask students to explore the EDSITEment-reviewed websites using the Study Activity and questions as guides. Once they have answered all of the questions, ask students to prepare a summary of what they learned to present to the class. Have everyone contribute to the overall discussion about Puritan values (the same question begins each list), and then have students present their information to the class. This should be no more than a few sentences highlighting the key concepts of the aspect of Puritan life that they researched.

Activity 2. What is a Puritan? Case Studies

Ask students to access the following websites and answer the questions listed below. This can be done individually or with partners, and can also be given as a homework assignment. Ask students to read slowly and carefully, looking up words they do not understand and writing them down in their notebook.

John Dane's Narrative

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6214

Read the first five paragraphs of John Dane's Narrative, until you reach the following passage: "Then said my mother, " go where you will, God he will find you out ." This word, the point of it, stuck in my breast; and afterwards God struck it home to its head."

What does John Dane's piece about morality tell you about Puritan life?
Define 'Providence' and explain John Dane's beliefs about Providence.
In the third paragraph of John Dane's narrative, he relates a story about his upbringing. In a paragraph, explain your reaction to his story. How is this different or similar to your own interactions with your parents?
Choose one paragraph in John Dane's narrative and summarize it in your own words.

Finally, write the following names on slips of paper, and have students draw them from a hat. A convenient PDF with all the names is available for you to print out.

Bridget Bishop; Rev. George Burroughs; Giles Cory; Mary Easty; Sarah Good; Rebecca Nurse; John Proctor; Ann Pudeator; Samuel Wardwell; Sarah Osbourne; William Stoughton; John Hathorne; Samuel Sewall; Francis Dane; Cotton Mather; Sarah Churchill; Elizabeth Hubbard; Mercy Lewis; Elizabeth Parris; Ann Putnam, Jr.; Mary Warren; Mary Wallcott; Abigail Williams; Tituba; Philip English; George Jacobs, Sr., Susannah Martin; Sir William Phips; Samuel Parris.

Ask students to do the following as a homework assignment:

Find your assigned person on the website ' Important Persons in the Salem Court Records ' and write five sentences about him or her answering some of these questions, or similar questions that you come up with on your own:

How old was the person?
What was the person's occupation?
What do we know about the person's family?
Why do people think this person was accused of witchcraft and/or accused others of witchcraft?
What is most remembered in about this person in current popular culture, if anything?
Was this person wealthy or poor?
Where did this person live?

Activity 3. The Salem Witch Trials

Introduce the trials by asking students:

What do you think of when you hear the word witch?

If time allows, have students read Words About the Word 'Witch' , available via the EDSITEment-reviewed Digital History website. Otherwise, you might use the website to guide your students' discussion of the term.

As a way to draw together the earlier work on Puritan beliefs and the more specific instance of the Salem Witch Trials, introduce to students the description of Witchcraft available at the EDSITEment-reviewed website History Matters. You might ask students questions like: Who was the head of a Puritan household? What was thought of women who stood out? What cues suggested signs of witchcraft? How do these cues fit within the Puritan worldview that you researched earlier?

At this point, students should begin to reconstruct the history of "What Happened in Salem?" They should begin with their individual person that they researched (see Activity 2). Make sure students follow their individual's role, no matter how small or large, as best they can throughout the process. In combination with this Chronology via the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive , have students separate into groups of four to create a timeline of the Salem Witch Trials. Events on the timeline should each have one sentence attached to them, to assure that students read information about the events, rather than just finding them on the Chronology. The students can illustrate their timelines if there is time for them to do so.

If some groups of students finish earlier than others, ask these students to access this petition for bail from accused witches . Ask students to click on the document and to try to read it. What was it like reading this kind of document? What was the document about? What were some of the reasons that the accused witches cite for why they should be allowed to leave the prison? You might consider recommending both the NARA Primary Document Analysis Worksheet (PDF) and How to Read Old Documents (from American Centuries) to help students figure out the petition.

As students are completing the timeline or reading the primary source document, post signs on your walls - on one side of the classroom, post the words "I agree" and on the other side, post the words "I don't agree". Read a series of controversial statements, listed below, and have students stand somewhere between the "I agree" and "I disagree". They don't have to agree or disagree, they can stand in the middle, or closer to one side than the other, wherever on the spectrum they fit. After each statement is read and students are standing in their spots based on levels of agreement, conduct a conversation from those places, so students can physically see where they are. Students may change physical positions if they change their minds based on discussion. If students move, they should be asked what convinced them to change their mind.

Feel free to add to or alter this list of statements:

There is nothing about the Puritan way of life that I wish was a part of my life.
The law is always right.
Nothing like the Salem Witch Trials happens nowadays.
People who are accused of crimes are usually bad people.
The 'afflicted' girls who made the witchcraft accusations were bad people.
You should never confess to something of which you are not guilty.
It was just a coincidence that most of the alleged witches were female.
There is a clear, easy explanation for why the Salem Witch Trials happened.
The trials happened because of the 'afflicted girls', and not because of other, larger social forces.
It is silly to believe in witches.

Some of these questions might be best asked of the historical people the students have been tracking since Activity 2. Have the students role-play their historical person, answering some of the questions as the student might think their historical person would respond. Make sure the students explain their rationale behind their decisions.

Activity 4. Causes of the "Hysteria"

Use the Salem Witch Trials as an opportunity to explore the concept of the multiplicity of explanations and causes there can be for one event. Ask students to brainstorm a list of reasons why they think the Salem Witch Trials might have happened, which you can then write on the board. Ask them to support their reasons based on evidence they've learned in their study of the event. Add some of these Causes for the Outbreak of Witchcraft Hysteria in Salem , available via the EDSITEment reviewed Digital History website, to their list. Discuss the possibility that there was more than one cause of this event. Ask students to identify other historical events to which there were many causes. To extend this lesson, you can ask your students to write a short essay underlining some of the causes of the Salem Witchcraft hysteria.

What kind of evidence was used during these trials?
Were the accused innocent until proven guilty?
Think about the vocabulary used in these court cases. Who makes reference to the Bible - the accused, the judges, the accusers, everyone? When do they reference the Bible? Why do you think they make these references?
What were the punishments for witchcraft? Were they appropriate punishments?
Who were the witnesses, if any? What did they add to the court proceedings? Was their testimony useful? Does it seem to have been taken into account by the judge? To which witnesses, or which testimonies, is more attention paid?
What pressures did the accusers face? The judges?
What kinds of things were the 'witches' accused of causing to happen?
Have students write a story, letter, or diary entry from the perspective of one of the afflicted. The writing should involve some or all of the following: personal feelings of the historical figure, description of 'fits' and other sensations experienced by the 'afflicted', an accusation, a court trial or recollections from a court trial, remorse. If students prefer, they may write a story, letter, or diary entry from the perspective of one of the accused, or from a judge or other court official. Again, the writing should be relevant to the historical event. Use these stories as an insight into the depth of understanding students have about the experience of the Salem Witch Trials. Students should either orally present their work or provide a written essay justifying the choices they made in their entry. What historical evidence supports their viewpoint?
As a possible introductory activity before examining life in Puritan New England (in Activity 1), have your students analyze their own belief systems so that they can better see the similarities and differences between their culture and that of Salem at this time. Ask your students to write down what they know about the religion to which they ascribe, or the rules that they have to follow as a result of being a part of their particular cultural heritage or society. This may be a good take-home activity, in which parents can also be involved. See attached sample worksheet: What are the Cultures that Shape You?
If you wish to enter the realm of historical fiction, a younger audience (ages 9–11) might appreciate The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. A more mature audience might appreciate The Crucible by Arthur Miller, or even The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. EDSITEment has a lesson plan on The Crucible, Dramatizing History in Arthur Miller's The Crucible .

Recommended Websites

Digital History: The Puritans
Digital History: The Puritan Idea of the Covenant
Words About the Word 'Witch'
Causes for the Outbreak of Witchcraft Hysteria in Salem
Important Persons in the Salem Court Records
Native American Indians 1680–1720
Place in Time: Land and People
Points of Contact: Sharing and Adapting
Struggle for Freedom: "Run-away from his Master"
Working: "Servant for Life"
"Black Yankees": Slavery in New England
Newcomers 1680–1720
John Dane Battle's Life's Temptations
petition for bail from accused witches

Materials & Media

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The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records

New hampshire.

Ballet still from The Crucible, woman standing en pointe in front of 4 men.

The Scottish Ballet performs Helen Pickett’s ballet version of The Crucibl e, Arthur Miller’s play based on the Salem witch trials of 1692. Miller used historical records and texts to help construct his play.

—© Jane Hobson

On March 23, 1692, a warrant was issued for the arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good of Salem Village on “suspition of acts of Witchcraft.” She was taken into custody the next day and jailed with her mother, Sarah, who had been accused of the same capital crime three weeks earlier. Since witches were often shackled in jail, something like shackles must have been adapted to fit little Dorothy, the youngest person in Salem accused of practicing the devil’s magic. Over the next year, more than 150 women, men, and children from Salem Village (present-day Danvers) and neighboring communities were formally accused of practicing witchcraft. A third of those arrested confessed but were not necessarily given lighter sentences. In all, 19 were hanged, one pressed to death, and five others died in jail.

Trouble in the tiny Puritan village started in February 1692, when eleven-year-old Abigail Williams and nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris, daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris, began acting strangely. The girls complained of bites, contorted their bodies, threw things, and fell into trances. A doctor’s examination concluded they were suffering from the evil effects of witchcraft. The “afflicted” girls were asked to name names, and they did.

“If you think about what’s going on in New England—threat of attack from warring tribes, unease about a new charter—and suddenly something strange happens in your household and you’re a minister. You know a witch was arrested in Chelmsford and another up in Ipswich. You believe that the devil is against Massachusetts, and you believe the devil is against your church, and you believe the devil is against you as a Protestant Puritan minister. And it’s in your house! There were reasons why it was credible that there could be witches in Salem Village,” says historian Margo Burns, the associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt .

Burns examines the witch trials through original-source documents in “The Capital Crime of Witchcraft: What the Primary Sources Tell Us,” a presentation sponsored by the New Hampshire Humanities Council.

Three women were taken into custody on March 1. Sarah Good, a beggar and mother, Sarah Osborne, a woman who hadn’t attended church in some time, and Tituba, Parris’s Indian slave, were all charged with witchcraft. Tituba confessed and identified more witches from Salem.

“It didn’t have to go any further than those three,” says Burns, “but they didn’t have a way to defend themselves. Just the usual suspects. All were marked for class and Tituba for race. John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, the local magistrates, coerced a false confession out of Tituba. If it had been another time, it might just have stopped there. The next two people should not have had their cases go forward. Hathorne and Corwin could have said, ‘Okay, we don’t buy this. No, you didn’t see her, because we know this person. This is not true.’ But they held them over.”

The next two defendants were Rebecca Nurse, an ancestor of Burns, and Martha Cory, both fully covenanted church members and of high social standing. They were accused of witchcraft based on “spectral evidence,” which meant the court accepted testimony that disembodied spirits, or specters, were sent through dreams or visions by the accused with the help of Satan to harm the victims by stabbing, choking, biting, and jabbing them with pins. The accused were interrogated in public. During questioning, the purported victims exhibited dramatic reactions while townspeople watched.

“There were discussions going on between ministers,” says Burns. “It wasn’t so much whether specters existed, it was how you interpret it. The big discussion was whether the devil could impersonate somebody with or without their permission. So that was tantamount to saying Rebecca Nurse gave the devil permission to go out and afflict these girls in her image.”

In May, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases, presided over by William Stoughton. “The court didn’t convene until June 2, 1692, so over half those accused, around 70, were just piling up in the jail,” says Burns.

Just as the jails were filling up with accused witches, the number of those claiming affliction also ramped up. One of the accusers listed in the court documents of Sarah Good was her daughter, Dorothy, who was coerced during an interrogation.

A number of villagers petitioned the court on Nurse’s behalf. Nurse was found not guilty, but Stoughton sent the jurors to reconsider. They changed their verdict to guilty. She was hanged on July 19, with Sarah Good and three others.

Five more were hanged in August and eight in September. In October, Increase Mather, a prominent minister in Boston, denounced the use of spectral evidence: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned.” That same month, Governor Phips terminated the special court. But that wasn’t the end. Cases would continue in a regular court in January. “When pious men and women who were in good standing in their own churches were accused, there was pushback,” says Burns.

The accusations ran their course in Salem Village, but not in Andover, where 48 were accused compared with 23 in Salem Village says Burns. “A lot of people were against spectral evidence, so confessions were now the gold standard to find people guilty. The confessions that came before were from people with no agency whatsoever, like little Dorothy. But when they got to Andover, the magistrates were really good at interrogating people in private. By September, they could coerce people like clockwork. There, a lot who confessed were children as young as six.” In 1693, the new Superior Court of Judicature tried the remaining cases and eventually cleared the jails. Phips pardoned all those sentenced to be executed by Stoughton in January 1693. The cases continued to be tried until mid May, but no one else was convicted. “The grand jury couldn’t even indict Tituba,” says Burns. The colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated many of the families. But the damage was done, and it was devastating.

On September 13, 1710, William Good went before the court to receive restitution for the losses he endured years earlier. In his petition he wrote:

To The Honourable Committee The humble representation Will’m. Goodof the Damage sustained by him in the year 1692. by reason of the sufferings of his family upon the account of supposed Witchcraft 1 My wife Sarah Good was In prison about four months & then Executed. 2 a sucking child dyed in prison before the Mothers Execution. 3 a child of 4 or 5 years old was in prison 7 or 8 months and being chain’d in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrifyed that she hath ever since been very chargeable haveing little or no reason to govern herself. And I leave it unto the Honourable Court to Judge what damage I have sustained by such a destruction of my poor family. And so rest Your Honours humble servant *William Good Salem.

Good was issued £30.

Laura Wolff Scanlan is a writer in Wheaton, Illinois.

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This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as “Records of the Salem Witch Trials” in the Winter 2022 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at [email protected] if you are republishing it or have any questions.

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The Salem Witch Trials History Research Paper

Introduction, witchcraft operations in salem, cause and trial of the witchdoctors, in the courtroom, defense of the accused, challenges of the trials, works cited.

Salem is a village in Massachusetts, which is a state in the New England region, in the North East of the United States of America. In the year 1692, it was afflicted by a certain kind of mysticism that drove some of the villagers into hysteria.

The hysteria manifested first in young girls whereby the girls exploded into bizarre behavior whose natural cause could not be traced. The young girls could be seized with convulsions, blasphemous screaming and melodramatic behaviors which were not normal. Since the physical source could not be traced, the community was led to believe that witches had invaded Salem.

The term witch should be understood and used in caution here. This is necessary in order for one to understand the trials of the witch in Salem. During the 17 th century it was believed that a witch is a person who had made a treaty with the devil so that there will be an exchange of a soul for evil powers which the witch can use to torment human beings (MacBain, 4). It is quite normal for victims of these powers to claim to have experienced horrible dreams and illusions.

They would also experience physical pain and exhibit bizarre habits which could be alarming to the community. The perpetrators of this evil act would be identified by the villagers, investigated, tried and then condemned if found guilty. In a village such as Salem, a person found guilty of performing witchcraft would be hanged. Thus the word witch is a strong word used as an accusation of Satan’s treaties. If someone were found involved in this pact, it would lead to death. Salem villagers were religious.

Thus religiously speaking, a witch is a follower of an ancient pagan belief system (MacBain, 4). The discovery of this fact led to a series of activities aimed at flushing out all the witchdoctors who had run amok with their evil activities. Since Sale was a religious village, its inhabitants began praying and fasting in order to get rid of this satanic evil (Sutter 5).

Witchcraft in operation could manifest in several ways. All of these ways alter the normal and natural ways things operate and cause abnormal things to happen (Sutter 7). The effects were usually seen in human beings, animals and plants. Salem was not an exemption. Witchcraft would go as far as killing infants and adults (Fradin & Fradin, 9). Some of the witches would kill domesticated animals (Sutter 7).

There were two young girls who were under the devil’s influence as a result of witchraft activities. These girls were brought to the investigators who forced them to reveal the people who controlled their bizarre characters (Salem Witchcraft Trials Cause and Effect 2).

As a result three women were identified. After close examination, it was revealed that the afflicted girls were having demonic illusions. One of them called Tituba who was a slave girl, said that she had seen the devil appearing to her either as a hog or a huge dog (Salem Witchcraft Trials Cause and Effect 4).

At first three women were identified and denounced as having colluded with the devil in bringing such atrocities into the village. These women were quite marginal to the village. Afterwards, more and more women were accused. A special case relates to this woman, Martha Corey, who was quite different from other people who had been convicted. This is because she was a noble congregant of the religious organizations in the village (Wilson 8).

Thus the fact that she was a witch revealed the magnitude of influence Satan had gained in the community. As the accusatory conditions continued to intensify, things took a strange turn in the lives of the witchdoctors. Many witchdoctors were identified, investigated, charged, and condemned. They would late be put to death (Goss 9). Some of them would face the gallows, one died under the pressure of stones and another one died in prison while awaiting trial (Goss 12).

There were at least 168 people who were accused of practicing witchcraft in 1692. Out of these, nineteen had been found guilty. They were hanged by October of the same year. However, no one who had pleaded guilty of practicing witchcraft was killed.

Salem is now the modern town of Danvers. The hysteria caused by two young girls marks the beginning of an interesting story. The two young girls namely Betty and Abigail, while in the court, behaved in a bizarre way that was far from natural. After careful diagnosis by Dr. William Griggs, it was found out that there was no natural cause of their mysterious behavior.

Dr. Griggs could not diagnose any medical condition that is why he finally diagnosed bewitchment. In those days, religious people believed that witchcraft was a cause of diseases and death and that witches gained their powers from the devil. This is the reason why the witches responsible would be killed so that they may finish off the devil’s operations.

Under enough pressure, the young girls named names of those who were responsible for their behaviors. Instead of admitting that their behavior started as a game, they connected their story with religious phenomena. Therefore, their slave girl, Totuba, was among the first three slaves to be accused after warrants of arrest were given (Goss 12).

The three appeared before the three Salem Town Magistrates in the house of Nathaniel Ingersoll. During the time when women were testifying in this trial, the young girls cried out loud claiming that the woman’s apparition was roaming the room while biting and beating them up. The spirit also appeared as an animal or a bird. After wide investigations, the slave girl did admit that she was indeed a witch.

As reasons for her actions, Tituba said that a dog, black in color, had threatened her before ordering her to cause harm to the young girls. Another thing that she claimed was that she used to attend witches meetings with her fellow convicted witches. Because of the success of this court, an intensive campaign was launched to hunt for more witches. As a result, the young girls were put under pressure to name other witches involved so that they can be tried.

Another witch was brought before the magistrates. She was called Martha. Although she maintained her calmness, the young ladies actions were enough to expose her. They were tormented and anguished throughout the court proceedings. The husband of Martha was also present and he against her.

Rebecca Nurse was the next woman to be brought before the magistrates. She was an outstanding puritan member who was also a prominent member of the community. Other women had joined the group of the afflicted girls. By this time the Magistrates had been convinced beyond doubt that whatever the afflicted girls said was true.

Other victims of Salem trials were John and Elizabeth Proctor who had been strong opponents of the Salem Witch trials since the beginning, a factor that worked against them. There was this victim called Sarah Cloyse who followed suite. She was the sister to Rebecca Nurse. Cloyse became a victim when she tried to oppose the trials and was in the process mentioned by the girls.

Another difficult case for the magistrate came when a mental woman was brought before them. Her name was Abigail Hobbs. However instead of acquitting her as insane, the court ruled against her as a witch because of the young girls actions. In April 21, the same year, the lies of Abigail caused the arrest of nine more people who came from far beyond the borders of the town of Salem.

Thus the witch trial of Salem was able to diversify to other surrounding communities and the number of these communities grew to 22. There is one peculiar incident that happened in the court of Salem when the two girls reviewed their accusations against Nehemiah Abbot. Hence Abbot was lucky enough to be released by the court making it to be the only time such an incident ever occurred (Oliver 2).

As it was at that time, Massachusetts had no formal charter. Therefore all the people who had been accused had to be held in prison until the time when a new charter was brought by the new governor in November, 1692. However, the new governor had no interest with the trials. He therefore established a court of Oyer and Terminar to do the job. New magistrates were brought to hear the cases (Oliver 3). By mid the following year, about one hundred people had been charged and imprisoned because of involving in witchcraft activities.

It was until June 2, 1693 that the particular Salem court had its first sitting thus causing Bridget Bishop to be the first person to be tried and was also found guilty of the offence. What followed was the signing of her death warranty by the three justices. She was then hanged on June 10, and later on buried in a shallow grave on Gallows Hill.

When Justice Saltonstall resigned from this court and doubted the entire issue, he was also accused of witchcraft. The next convicts to appear were also found guilty and sentenced to death. During the course of the next trial which involved Sarah Wilds and Elizabeth How as defendants, Reverend Samuel Willard was also found to be guilty of practicing witchcraft. However he never appeared before the three magistrates since he was friends with some of them who gave him some protection.

This is an open indication that there were some innocent people whom the justices sent to their death (Paralumun 41). The young girls became celebrities in this field. Due to this celebrity status they were sent to other towns beyond Salem to help in the search for witches. By this time, twenty four people had died because of engaging in witchcraft or witchcraft-related activities. Nineteen people were hanged on Gallows Hill in the small town of Salem while others died in prison waiting to be tried in court (Paralumun 14).

As it is well known, any person being accused in a court of law has the right to ask for professional help. In Salem, this was also the case although many other cases in New England did not allow any professional help for people convicted of witchcraft in a court of law. Hence in this episode, many prominent people rose to defend the accused. Most of those people who rose to defend the accused were close friends and family members of the accused.

The court that was formed to investigate, charge and convict such cases in Salem was not short of its challenges. This is because in these cases, there were two parties. During this episode, both parties were comprised of prominent village leaders. Also, the defenders of the accused offered strong opposition because they were powerful members in the village council (Sutter 3).

The other challenge came from political reasons. Two years ago, the courts were suspended. Thus the trials of these people would take months to happen. People accused of practicing this act would be charged and held in jail for months before they could be tried. This was also the period of political instability. Thus whenever a conflict would arise, between towns and people, the government could not interfere by intervening. Thus these animosities were left to play out unchecked.

The Salem Witch trials indicated several things that happened in the society. Witchcraft was so prevalent at that time. Evil in this town was at its high level of operation. On the other hand, the trials revealed an aspect of corruption whereby the justices exhibited corruption by granting the reverend court protection when he was accused of practicing witchcraft. As a recap therefore, the Salem Witch trials were not based on the whole truth since the two young girls did not speak the truth as the process was nearing the end.

Fradin, Judith B & Fradin, Dennis B. The Salem Witch Trials . Marshall Cavendish. 2008. Print.

Goss, K. David. The Salem Witch Trials: A Reference Guide . Greenwood Publishing Group. 2008. Print.

MacBain, Jenny. The Salem Which Trials: A Primary Source History of the Witchcraft Trails in Salem, Massachusetts . The Rosen Publishing Group. 2003. Print.

Oliver, Benjamin D. The Salem Witchcrafts Trial 1692 . The Web Chronology Project. 1997. Web.

Paralumun (2010). Salem Witch Trials. Web.

Salem Witchcraft Trials Cause and Effect . Oppapers.Com. 2010. Web.

Salem Witchcraft Trials. Oppapers.Com. 2010. Web.

Sutter, Tim. Salem Witchcraft: The Events and Causes of the Salem witch Trials . Salem Witch Trials. 2003. Web.

Wilson, Lori L. The Salem Witch Trials . Twenty-First Century Books. 1997. Print.

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The Salem Witch Trials Critical Essays
Salem Witch Trials 1692-1693. An infamous episode in American history, the Salem witch trials of 1692 resulted in the execution by hanging of fourteen women and five men accused of being witches ...
Salem Witch Trials
Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play "The Crucible" (1953), using ...
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The Salem witch trials (1692-93) were a series of investigations and persecutions that caused 19 convicted 'witches' to be hanged and many other suspects to be imprisoned in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. ... As the trials continued, accusations extended beyond Salem Village to surrounding communities. After Governor Phips ...
The Salem Witch Trials
It should be known that these trials were mostly conducted between 1692 and 1693 in Massachusetts (Godbeer 12). As far as these trials and persecutions are concerned, it is estimated that approximately 200 individuals were accused of witchcraft (through practice). In this case, witchcraft was widely referred to as the devils magic which ended ...
Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials were a series of legal proceedings in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692-1693 resulting in the deaths of 20 innocent people accused of witchcraft and the vilification of over 200 others based, initially, on the reports of young girls who claimed to have been harmed by the spells of certain women they accused of witchcraft.. The initial accusers were Betty Parris (age 9) and ...
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The Salem Witch Trials are a series of well-known investigations, court proceedings, and prosecutions that took place in Salem, Massachusetts over the course of 1692 and 1693. This illustration by Howard Pyle depicts one of the accusers pointing at the accused and saying, "There is a flock of yellow birds around her head." It is an example ...
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Salem Witch Trials Essay Topics and Outline Examples Essay Title 1: The Salem Witch Trials: An Examination of Mass Hysteria and Its Consequences. Thesis Statement: The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were a tragic chapter in American history characterized by mass hysteria, social dynamics, and the persecution of innocent individuals, and this essay ...
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The Salem witch trials have gripped American imaginations ever since they occurred in 1692. At the end of the 17th century, after years of mostly resisting witch hunts and witch trial prosecutions, Puritans in New England suddenly found themselves facing a conspiracy of witches in a war against Satan and his minions. ... And suffering extended ...
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The economic theories of the Salem events tend to be two-fold: the first attributes the witchcraft trials to an economic downturn caused by a "little ice age" that lasted from 1550-1800; the second cites socioeconomic issues in Salem itself. Emily Oster posits that the "little ice age" caused economic deterioration and food shortages ...
The Salem Witch Trials Historical Background
Essays and criticism on The Salem Witch Trials - Historical Background. Select an area of the website to search ... 1687 and 1689-90, before Salem. Richard Godbeer (essay date 1992) ...
83 Salem Witch Trials Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
The narcissism and egocentrism of Abigail lead her to accuse others. The Salem Witch Trials History. Salem is a village in Massachusetts, which is a state in the New England region, in the North East of the United States of America. We will write. a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts.
Salem Witch Trial
Seventeenth century Salem, Massachusetts saw the popularization of witch trials where three hundred forty four (344) people were accused of being witches (DuBois & Dumenil, 2012). The accusation which became known as witchcraft hysteria in history stunned the whole town. It was first initiated by three (3) young girls who were relatives of the ...
Essay on The Salem Witch Trials
The Salem witch trials of 1692 took place in Salem, Massachusetts. Overall, 141 people were arrested as 19 were hanged and one person crushed to death. Researchers describe the Salem witch trials as a series of court trials that were aimed at prosecuting persons who had been accused of witchcraft. The trials took place between 1692 and 1693 [ 1] .
Salem witch trials
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, died under torture after refusing to enter a plea, and at least ...
The Salem Witch Trials: [Essay Example], 600 words
The Salem Witch Trials have since become a cautionary tale of the dangers of mass hysteria and the consequences of unchecked power. This essay will explore the events leading up to the trials, the key players involved, and the lasting impact on American society. Through a comprehensive analysis of primary sources and historical accounts, this ...
The Complex Conflicts of The Salem Witch Trials
Published: Mar 8, 2024. The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. The trials resulted in the executions of twenty people, fourteen of whom were women, and the imprisonment of many others. This dark period in American history has ...
Understanding the Salem Witch Trials
In 1691, a group of girls from Salem, Massachusetts accused an Indian slave named Tituba of witchcraft, igniting a hunt for witches that left 19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to death, and over 150 more people in prison awaiting a trial. In this lesson, students will explore the characteristics of the Puritan community in Salem, learn about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and try to ...
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The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records. On March 23, 1692, a warrant was issued for the arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good of Salem Village on "suspition of acts of Witchcraft.". She was taken into custody the next day and jailed with her mother, Sarah, who had been accused of the same capital crime three weeks earlier.
Final Essay on Salem Witch Trials
Historical Investigation TO WHAT EXTENT DID THE EVENTS OF THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS IMPACT THE INDIVDUALS INVOVLED? The Salem Witch trials occurring in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts were a series of hearings and prosecutions that took place in regards to the accusations of over 200 people accused of affiliation with witchcraf 1.
History EE.docx
The Salem witch trials mark a dark and troublesome in America's history. What started out as child's play between three girls, quickly escalated into something much more. Salem,a town that was facing an abundance of issues, was heading towards complete chaos. This chaos can be attributed to several things, such as the economic divide between Salem Town and Salem Village and the religious ...
The Salem Witch Trial
Introduction. Salem is a village in Massachusetts, which is a state in the New England region, in the North East of the United States of America. In the year 1692, it was afflicted by a certain kind of mysticism that drove some of the villagers into hysteria. The hysteria manifested first in young girls whereby the girls exploded into bizarre ...
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In the town of Salem, besides getting arrested or jailed, people were also excommunicated from the church. In conclusion, the McCarthy Red Scare and the Salem Witch Trials, although occurring at different times, share many similarities such as mass panics, hysteria, paranoia, false accusations, and
History Extension Proposal
Download. Description of Preliminary Research The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693, and involved over two hundred people being accused of practicing witchcraft. After the execution of twenty people, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted.