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The Causes of the Salem Witch Hunt Essay

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The Causes of the Salem Witch Hunt

Many American colonists brought with them from Europe a notion in witches and an intrigue with alleged manipulation with the devil. During the seventeenth century, people were executed for witchcraft all over the colonies, chiefly in Massachusetts. Various of the accused were women, inducing some recent historians to recommend that charges of witchcraft were a way of dominating women who endangered the present economic and social order at that time.

In 1692 the famous Salem, Massachusetts, witchcraft trials took place, and that summer hundreds of people in the colony were taken into custody without any reason whatsoever.

To comprehend the events of the
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Of these nine girls, only one is related to me, Ann Putnam. Her grandmother was Priscilla Gould, the sister of Zaccheus Gould. Ann was born in 1680 to Thomas Putnam and Ann.

The affair, which led to the Witch Trials, as a matter of fact turn out in what is now the town of Danvers, then a district of Salem Town, recognized as Salem Village. Propelling the frenzy was the grotesque, apparently unexplainable behavior of two young girls; the daughter, Betty, and the niece, Abigail Williams, of the Salem Village minister, Reverend Samuel Parris.

Magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne in February 1692, thought over three accused women. Corwin’s home, known as the Witch House, still stands at the corner of North and Essex Streets in Salem, furnishing supervised tours and tales of the first witchcraft trials. John Hathorne, an ancestor of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, is buried in the Charter Street Old Burying Point. (Jones, 163)

To comprehend the happening of the Salem witch trials, it is essential to explore the times in which allegation of witchcraft occurred. There were the customary stresses of 17th-century life in Massachusetts Bay Colony. A strong belief in the devil, factions surrounded by Salem Village extremists and competition
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