The Salem Witch Trials - a Research Paper

Kappanadze, Margaret. "Baker, Emerson W.: A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience." Library Journal 15 Sept. 2014: 92. General OneFile. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

Puritans thought that witches were the devil’s way to test their religious beliefs. Therefore, eliminating witches was the only way to beat the devil. The only thing worse than witchcraft, according to the capital crimes from 1641, was worshiping any God other than the Puritan God. They shunned science, interpreted natural events as the work of the devil, and were suspicious of outsiders. Puritan communities were the only ones who held trials and convicted witches even though many colonists believed in witchcraft.4 Before the Salem witch trials, there were other cases in Charlestown, Boston, and

The search for commies and witches happened at different points in time but had many similarities with very few differences. George Santayana said that, "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." this quote I feel directly goes along with McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials.

The Salem Witch Trials began in the spring of 1692 after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several residents of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused were executed by hanging and one person was pressed to death. The young girls claimed that Samuel Parris’ Caribbean slave, Tituba, was the first to perform witchcraft and tell the girls about witchcraft and voodoo. The fatal frenzy began after the nine-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old niece of Salem’s Puritan minister, Samuel Parris, started behaving strangely and erratically. Abigail Williams, his niece, was the first to display fits of hysteria. Betty Parris, the daughter, soon became sick, and soon after her two more

The Salem Witch Trials were a horrendous event in American History that occurred in the epitome of enlightenment of the New World. In 1692 a group of teenage girls accused over 150 men and women of conspiring with the Devil to become witches. The accused faced consequences ranging from public humiliation to death by hanging. The Salem Witch Trials did not take place in a civilization of wicked simpletons, the Puritans in question were a highly educated and moral people, model leaders in terms of education and religion. However within the Trials, members of the court replace logic and reason with fear and paranoia. The court also ignores the warnings of a respected minister, resulting in the court favoring spectral evidence such as visions

Most people believe that during the Salem witch trials the supposed witches were burnt at the stake which was not true; however, during the witch hunt in Europe, most of them were burnt. The Salem witch trials were a series of executions that took place in Salem Town and Salem Village, Massachusetts. These trials happened because the people were believed to have practiced witchcraft. Throughout these trials, twenty people were executed, and many more put in jail. Throughout history and in modern times, witches were seen as evil mythical people who were possessed by the devil; this was the case in 1692 in Massachusetts.

Historical experts of the period state that it may just have been typical teenage hysteria that went a little too far, which was misperceived as the work of Satan because of the omnipresent, religious overtones in the New England colonies (Goss 51). Others have cited encephalitis as the reason behind the strange behaviors of the young Salem girls. No one can say for certain. That is an important notion in this context. Twenty innocent colonists were executed because they were believed to have been witches or involved in some form of witchcraft. From a retrospective standpoint, a person now knows this is wrong because it is unjustified. There is no scientific evidence to support the claims of the prosecutor. Witches who cast spells and fly on broomsticks are fantasies best reserved for the Halloween

The Salem Witch Trials are one of the worst occurrences to have ever happened, as many people were wrongly thrown in prison and executed. So many people were wrongly convicted that this is marked as one of our country’s lowest moments. Some questions people may have about the Salem Witch Trials are what happened, who was affected, and why was everyone paranoid?

I’m sure many of you have heard about the Salem Witch Trials, when many people were accused of witchcraft. When did it all start, you may ask? How? Well, two girls named Betty and Abigail Parris began displaying some odd behavior. They were having seizures and convulsions, shrieked loudly, entered trances, and suffered from high fevers. When their father finally called a physician, he said that the sisters may be enduring the effects of witchcraft. When asked who they thought were witches, they named three people: Tituba, a slave whom had been telling them stories about witchcraft from her native country, the Barbados; Sarah Good, a peasant mother; and Sarah Osborne, who regularly didn’t attend church. The two Sarahs

The Salem witch trials were an infamous series of prosecution and hearings of people in the colony of Massachusetts. These people were accused of witchcraft and were also said to be possessed by the devil. The majority of the trials began in January 1692 and ended by September 1692. Around two hundred individuals had been accused and twenty had died during the craze of the trials. These trials have had a legacy which has lasted for centuries.

The law did not exploit the “innocent until proven guilty” principle, instead if someone made it to trial, the law assumed guilt (Louis-Jacques 3). So, the court quickly assumed someone guilty, contradicting with the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”, it became “guilty until proven innocent” which caused many innocent people to be jailed or executed. The Rev. Cotton Mather, writing on for several Boston ministers, suggested carefulness in deciding on such evidence but at the same time encouraged the court to undertake "the speedy and forceful prosecution" of anyone guilty of witchcraft. The first woman tried and executed in June was an almost sixty-year o and owner of a tavern, Bridget Bishop. The accusations continued and more and more people jailed and dead, however it soon began to spread outside of Salem into Boston, Cambridge, and Ipswich. The most-lively of the accusers lived in Salem Village, in which this town suffered the greatest from executions, people in Andover sustained the most amount of accusations (Ray

Would you be able to tell if someone was possessed by a witch? An often repetitive problem that comes up with investigations into the unknown, is if you can tell if someone was or is possessed by a being. One of the biggest times this was brought into investigation was during the Salem Witchcraft Trials, where witchcraft was brought into suspect. The trials being the effect of witches possessing the girls who lived in Salem.

The Salem Witch Trials was quite something that was not just or done properly. Throughout the video I have examined some things not right and sometimes humorous because of how they judge and condemn a living soul. The judges acted like God and judge right there at that moment to decide that person's fate to live or to die. How they judge according to the video was they have the so called possessed young girls and then the girls seem to decide the person fate.

It is important to note that in the 17th century, people from Massachusetts were exposed to a kind of fear that was linked to the Devil and being constantly portrayed as always finding for all possible ways to infiltrate and interfere with Christianity in the American society (Clark and Aronson 401). In connection to this, it is important to understand that the Salem community was one of the strongly religious communities living that lived in near isolation and to some extent, in its own New World where the sense of fearing the devil had been made a part of the society. The fear that the community living in this area had was triggered when Tituba, one of the accused witches went on to confess that she was working for the devil (Martin and Bascle 70).

Witch hunts are infamous throughout in history. A barrage of witch hunts happened around the time of the colonization of the New World. Most particularly, the Salem Witch Trials which showed how much people were influenced. The majorities of the accused were women because of being unmarried, childless, widowed, and had reputations in their communities for assertiveness and independence. The Salem witch trials brought forth the idea of the “social strain theory”: which is defined as “The Salem witchcraft scare may have reflected social tension that found their outlet through an attack on people perceived as outsiders” (Faragher 51). It was mass hysteria that made this Witch Hunt in their community. Surprisingly, witch hunts still happen today.