The Witches : Suspicions, Betrayals And Hysteria Of The Salem Witch Trials Essay

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.

While spring is a time for growth, newlife, and awakening, in the spring of 1692 a rotten presence (both figuratively and literally) swept over Salem Village, Massachusetts when a group of young girls claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. Not only was this the spark of a religious uproar in the quaint, puritan town; but a spark that lit the match which eventually convicted over a hundred innocent people and claimed 20 lives. While the true pain of these trials cannot be seen in photographs or videos, it can be experienced through the words that have been written. In Marilynne Roach’s novel, “Six Women of Salem”, she tells the untold story of six women who underwent the grueling Salem witchcraft trials, and she evoked a strong sense of empathy for the victims through her use of first person narratives and factual evidence. Through these devices Roach successfully highlighted the twisted, prejudice, and uneducated society that America was, and, in some ways, still is today.

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.

The Salem Witch Trials was an uncanny and eerie event of hearings and prosecutions of people being accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts. Although it lasted from 1691 to 1692, it lead to more than 200 people, including men and women, being accused and arrested of witchcraft and 20 of those people executed. The hysteria began with two young girls: Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams claiming to be possessed by the devil, causing the “witch-fever” among the Salem village. In this essay the circumstances behind poor harvest, sickness and the conjecture of witches and witchcraft being highly considered as a cause in this era will be described. The Salem Witch Trials were caused by environmental factors because the Salem community had limited understanding of natural causes such as poor harvest, sickness and diseases.

The Salem witch trials, that occurred in colonial Massachusetts, were a hostile part of American history. People lived in a constant state of paranoia and fear. A great number of people were accused of practicing witchcraft, which was thought to be connected to the devil, and some were even executed. Eventually, the colony realized the faults in the trials. By reading the primary sources ‘A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft Chapter II’ by John Hale and Two Letters by Governor William Phips, we are able to discover a wealth of knowledge about the aforementioned trials. The two sources allow the reader to gain insight into how the trials were flawed by showing the nature of the Salem Witch Trials, the evidence used to find the witches guilty, and the role native americans played in the trials. While also exhibiting how primary sources can be a disadvantage in navigating through historical events.

Many people are aware of the witch hunt that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts in the year 1692, however these same people may not be as familiar with the other witch hunt that also occurred in New England during the same year. Escaping Salem: the other witch hunt of 1692, written by Richard Godbeer, is a historical monograph that reconstructs the, mostly unheard-of witch hunt, that occurred in Stamford, Connecticut. The book also gives its readers insight into the minds of early American citizens. Thus, the theme of Escaping Salem, beside witchcraft, is human nature and Richard Godbeer’s thesis is that humans demonize others before recognizing their own share of human frailty. It is evident that he is biased toward the witches and sympathizes with them. This, of course, is not surprising since they were irrationally punished because of their neighbours unsubstantiated accusations. Richard Godbeer is currently a Professor of History at the University of Miami, who offers courses on a broad range of topics, including sex and gender in early America, witchcraft in colonial New England, religious culture in early America, and the American Revolution. He is also the author of 11 other historical monographs.

The communities most affected were ones who were experiencing multiple crises concerning growth, gender and hostile groups. All of which Cotton Mather considered to be the work of Satan. He provided detailed interpretation of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1693 from an observer’s perspective. Mather’s work was a work written about the accounts on the date of June 29 1692, and more specifically about the trial of Susanna Martin. Throughout this paper we will be looking at the Salem with trials from an insider point of who Cotton Mather seemed to be writing to in his encounters, and what side he stood for in terms of sides and what his intent was to do with these

The central issue at stake for people during the Salem witch trials were a series of hearing and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft. It all started in Salem Village, in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. A man by the name of Richard Godbeer, the author of “The Salem Witch Hunt” and several other books is a professor at the University of Miami. Godbeer’s research and teaching interests center on colonial and revolutionary America. Also, his fields of interest are in gender, sex, witchcraft and religious culture.

The change in nature of the construction of the Salem witch trials from Cotton Mather’s traditional recount of the 1692 witch crisis, The Wonders of the Invisible World: The Devil in New England, written in 1693, to postmodern writers of history, has resulted in the absence of objective truths that is merely manipulated to satisfy the historiographers’ purpose. Karlsen’s 1987 work, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, attempts to rediscover women’s history by shedding light on the “systematic violence against women” and preserving what she believes as ‘self-evident truths’. Therefore, her consultation of sources seeks to be truthful by acknowledging major reinterpretations made by John Demos and Paul Boyer

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 spread just about as fast as the Black Plague. This epidemic caused chaos among neighbors in a community. The chronology of events describes an awful time for colonists from June 10th to September 22nd of that year. The books "Salem Possessed" by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, "The Story of the Salem Witch Trials" by Bryan Le Beau, and "The Devil in the Shape of a Woman" by Carol Karlsen all describe these events and provide varying explanations for the epidemic that plagued Salem Village. This review will look at the

The 17th- Century Colonial New England historical website was produced and maintained by Margo Burns. Margo Burns is an independent scholar with a bachelor’s degree in English from Mount Holyoke College. While she has no academic background in history, she has a growing reputation for specializing in the Salem witch trials, especially those in North Andover. There is much history to explore in the 17th century; however, the witch trials of Salem have attracted more scholarly attention than most events in colonial America. Although some of the recent scholarship examines these trials, there is still so much more to learn about this revolutionary event that impacted the American society. The Web site, 17th-Century Colonial New England, can help mitigate interested researchers.

Witch Hour: The Aspects of the Puritan Worldview that Contributed to the Mass Hysteria in Salem

In the past, the word Salem has always been somewhat synonymous with the infamous witch trials. Thanks to works such as Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”, many people find it hard not to envision a community torn apart by chaos, even though Miller’s play was not so much about the witch trials but instead a commentary on the rampant McCarthyism going on at the time he wrote it. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, however, see a very different picture when the Salem witch trials are mentioned. Rather than overlook the “ordinary” people living in the towns in which they write about (in the case of Salem Possessed, the town of Salem, Massachusetts), they instead take the instance of the witch trials of 1692 and

There are many important contributing factors as to why the witchcraft hysteria gripped Salem, Massachusetts. Whether it would be superstition, religion, economics, politics, or gender, they all played a huge part in this chaotic event. One of them is superstition, the belief in and reverence for supernatural beings, caused everyone in the miniature town of Salem to hang their very own citizens due to young girls pretending that some ladies in town are witches and that they wounded them by using “witchery”.

Every nation at one time or another undergoes a period of darkness and despair. Making its way overseas from Europe; to a little town in Massachusetts Bay Colony, known as Salem, would soon find themselves to be the next victim’s amongst the witch hysteria. In 1692, as the town feared of being consumed of black magic, many men, mostly women, and a few children would find themselves under attack of being accused of witchcraft by their fellow townsmen. Instead of investigating into possible causes to the extremely violent outburst, hallucinations, muscle spasms, and vomiting; the work of the devil would be to blame. In this essay we will take a look into the beginning of the so called ‘witch hysteria’ and how it began. Journey to discover more about who the victims were and how they were wrongly accused and executed. As well as discovering what was believed to be the reasoning behind the illness which lead the accused to forever be damned as a witch. And finally, exploring into how the town recovered once the infamous Witch Trials ended. With only in a years’ passing, Salem would forever be remembered as a colony which was consumed of witches, and to this day has led to the sad and historical legacy of the Salem Witch Trials.