The Salem Witch Trials

In January 1692, when a group of juvenile girls began to display bizarre behavior, the tight-knit Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts couldn’t explain the unusual afflictions and came to a conclusion. Witches had invaded Salem. This was the beginning of a period of mass hysteria known as The Salem Witch Trials. Hundreds of people were falsely accused of witchcraft and many paid the ultimate price of death. Nineteen people were hung, one was pressed to death, and as many as thirteen more died in prison. One of the accused Elizabeth Bassett Proctor, a faithful wife and mother, endured her fictitious accusation with honor and integrity.

However, it did not do much good. The girls started having painful fits which ended up placing Tituba in the court house with Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were a series of trials in which twenty-four people were killed after being accused of practicing witchcraft. These trials were caused by different social climates of the area including the very strong lack of a governor, the split between Salem Village and Salem Town, and the strict puritan lifestyle during the time period. Tituba, the black slave, was a foreigner from Barbados. Her role in society was to take care of Mr. Parris’s family. Tituba’s situation contributed to her role in the witch trials because Mr. Parris promised her freedom if she confessed guilty. Tituba also realized that with her false confession of being a witch also helped keep her life, therefore she accused other people in the village

It was evident that the Puritan beliefs were strictly inflexible. They thought that their rules were too severe, and it motivated them to accuse others and use them as scapegoats. As a result, it formed a community conflict. Modern historians have noticed a repetitive pattern throughout New England in the early 1600s: community stress had a direct relationship to accusations of witchcraft (Saari, 23). Therefore, they were in great fear of being accused. The Puritans began to wonder who among them might be with the devil in disguise (Saari, 24). They thought deeply if a “local person was in a pact with the devil then that person was ultimately responsible for the community’s problems” (Saari, 24). Blaming others was becoming a constant and endless situation. “They were focused on cooperating simply to survive (Saari, 24). Innocent people often pleaded guilty to being witches to avoid torture and potential death. These accusations became madness because of the Puritans’ overly pious views on lifestyle.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 was a great delirium provoked by the Puritans religious theories, the youths apathy, and the contaminated accusers. The hallucinating women were innocently accused of the practicing of witchcraft, which was only occurring due to the contaminated rye bread, and their actions harmed the innocent. This striked the people around, as they became interested to watching these women, committing the actions they faithfully should not be due to their strong belief system. The religious felonies is what struck the 1692

What happened in Connecticut and Maryland? Witch trials were held for a multiple account of people, mainly women. In today’s time, no one would ever think of hanging someone for witchcraft. However, back in the 1600’s, it was a whole other ball game. Connecticut was the first state to hold an actual witch trial, while the Salem Witch Trials in Maryland were just around the corner. What makes these two historical events so important are there similarities and how much unnecessary death was involved.

The events that happen throughout history influence the world as they happen. History can be good or bad, fact or fiction, globally influential or locally influential; it is important for people to learn about the events that happened throughout history in order to study the past failures and past successes. One globally known event from history is The Salem Witch Trials. During the Salem Witch Trials, different types of people were wrongly accused of practicing witchcraft. When a person was accused of being a witch, he or she was put on trial. Because a person accused of witchcraft was already considered guilty, many people were either put in jail or put to death. The Salem witch trials were a bad part of history that were influenced by religious

I would like to go witness the unsettled universe of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts back in 1692. Hearing the young girls screaming and barking, prancing around in the woods would help understand what the fear the townspeople were holding. This behavior was extremely rare coming from these teenage maidans. Many town doctors went to check on the maidans. After an extremely precise examination the doctor confirmed that the maidens were bewitched. Whoever triggered this disastrous event should be found and be prosecuted. Soon this started to spread all over Salem. I want to be able to see what triggered the “witches” to catch spell on others and how bizzare every townspeople acted blaming each other for being witches in order to not

Throughout history people have turned to events to distract themselves from what was going on in their lives. The ways that they distract themselves could be something as simple as doing a puzzle or as extreme as blaming others for something to create drama, the Salem Witch Trials were no different. The Salem Witch Trials served as a way for the colonists to distract themselves from the struggles that they were facing such as economic hardships, teenagers being bored, and the feuds between people in the colony, these things ultimately lead to this terrible tragedy.

As the Enlightenment began in Europe many of the witch hysterias died down, however the Puritans who had immigrated to America brought many of the old views and feelings to the colonies. In late 1691, a group of young Salem girls began to act strangely (Stewart 14). It began when Elizabeth and Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris, heard stories of magic from a slave named Tituba (Witch hunt 13). These girls began speaking nonsense and refused to pray; they were quickly declared bewitched (Cry Witch 7). When asked, they accused Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne as being witches (Stewart 14; Witch hunt 14).

During the year of 1692, the villages of Salem Village and Salem Town became incriminated in the hunt of questionable witches or heretics among their residents. “Nineteen people were executed for witchcraft, one died after being crushed to death during his questioning, and seven more died in prison awaiting trial after a special tribunal was created to address the accusations.” Later on the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and eventually compensated the families of those convicted. The Salem Witch Trials were an event in history that displays how unjust the judicial system can be. In this paper I will highlight the origin in where the Salem Witch Trials began and I will explore the life of John and Elizabeth Proctor, victims of this event.

The “Salem Witch Trials” were very, very crazy. They were events in which people blamed others of witchcraft… witchcraft! They believed these people have been possessed by the devil’s black magic and could possess others with the same evil magic, thus starting the tale of the witches of Salem.

The first large group of colonists to come to the new world were Puritans who were strict Christians that wanted to purify the church of England. When they couldn’t, they moved to America in order to freely practice their form of Christianity. Due to their strict beliefs, Puritans were close minded individuals who looked down on anyone that did not have the same beliefs. Throughout the year 1692 in Salem village in the Massachusetts bay colony, two girls started to have “fits”; however, the doctors did not know what was happening to these girls, and this led to the accusations of witchcraft. The first person accused was the family’s maid, Tichiba, she was a Native American slave, and she would not be the only person accused. A pattern appeared throughout the trial that the supporters of a church in Salem village were the accusers who accused the opponents of this new church. Due to long feuds between different families the Witch Trials turned into ending those long feuds by accusing the person of being a Witch. Furthermore, during the trials Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman and highly educated individual, made account of the trials from a biased point of view. Mather wanted to continue the trials until every witch was found, and he created a hortatory address in order to urge the people of Salem to act and not stop the trials. After the trials had ended John Hale, a clergyman whose own wife was accused of witchcraft, decided to write an account of what happened from a

During the seventeenth century, many Puritans became fed up with the Church of England and its devilish ways. They wanted to break free from it, and make changes elsewhere. They got permission to set up a colony in Massachusetts Bay, and soon after that, over twenty-thousand Puritans fled from England to America. They decided to base their colony on the word of God, and believed God would protect them if they followed his commandments. This meant that if anyone were to sin, “they didn’t want God to protect them because they already worshiped the devil,” and “anyone who worshipped the devil was a witch who used witchcraft to possess others.” Because of this theory, many people were accused of being witches and using witchcraft. The most notorious series of hearings and prosecutions for those accused of witchcraft took place in Salem Village, Massachusetts, known as the Salem Witch Trials.

The Salem Witch Trials were a series of trials held against people that seemed to be bewitched, or controlled by the devil, many of these people, almost completely women, were eventually hung by the neck. This event during early American Colonization truly altered the lives of Massachusetts citizens for years to come.