How Did The Salem Witch Trials Distract Themselves

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.

From the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 to World War II and McCarthyism in the 1950s, many negative effects were brewed by hatred and discrimination against the innocent population.

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 horrendous days in which a reasonable amount of people died, and it certainly caused a severe impact in the society that the colonizer were trying to create. The strong connection that the colonizers had with regard to the bible was a very important fact in it. Plenty of people felt that Satan was behind all the witchery that was going on, and some other thought that Satan wanted to “colonize” them through enchantments. Hence, people was getting crazy when it came to hunting witches, and some even got to the point of killing two dogs because they thought those dogs were witches. Consequently, I believe that a big cause of the Salem Witch Trials was that people was getting crazy when it came to hunting witches.

It all comes back to two young kids they were acting strange they were not them self people believed that they were possessed by the devil they were thought to be witches. how did the devil become associated with witches and witchcraft?

Why did the Salem Witch Trials happen? ¨The question ´Why Salem?’ will probably never have a definite answer. It seems, at bottom, that an unsavory brew of village enmities and jealousies, gossip, a narrow-minded belief system spread through the community...¨ (Brandt,2014). The citizens of Salem were blaming others for a misfortune in their lives. The neighbors were saying that every time they stood up it was as if their backs were being broken and blaming innocent people. ¨ Anything suspicious in nature- an unexplained illness (and most illnesses in the 17th century were unexplained)a calamity or misfortune- might be a witches evil work,¨(Brandt, 2014). 18 of these innocent ¨Witches were hanged, And the 1 person was crushed to death.

In the Salem Witch Trials of 1690s, many men and women were accused of being

The Salem Witch Trials were a sequence of hearings, prosecutions, and hangings of people who were thought to be involved in witchcraft in Massachusetts. These trials occurred between February 1692 and May 1693("The Salem Witch Trials, 1692." ). The Trials resulted in the execution of twenty people, in fact, most of them were women. The first of the trials began in several towns in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, such as Salem Village (currently known as Danvers), Salem Town, Ipswich, and Andover("Salem Witch Museum." ). The most infamous trials were tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692, in Salem Town. Robert Calef, the author of More Wonders of the Invisible World, a book composed throughout the mid-1690s denouncing the recent Salem witch trials of 1692, summarized the trials saying

There are many factors that contribute to the cause behind the Salem Witch Trials but I am only going to state the ones I feel most important to me like politics, religion, family feuds, economics, and the imagination and fear of the people. With such a small town there is a lot of talk and conflict among others which begins causing hysteria and eventually got 20 people killed because of it, people who were not in fact guilty.

What had been just a suspicion turned into a craze, the conflict these people had created would kill many innocent people until a compromise was found. Most women accused as witches were older, ugly, and unkempt (Wilson; 26; Roach 84). If someone was different in any way they could be accused as a witch; age, physical disability, mental disability, looked down on, powerless, outcasts, or criminals (Smith; how). The witch trials would then continue, so special courts were needed. A special court was set up by Sir William Phips to decide the fate of the witches. The two courts were Oyer; to hear, and terminer; to decide the fate of witches (Cellania; Roach 3). People were accused as a witches if they denied their existence (Latson). All the witches had

Human beings always have been curious creatures. We are a species that is always searching for answers to unexplainable events. Take aliens for example. To us, aliens may or may not exist (depending on your individual belief of course). Yet we still take such an interest in them that we continuously search for answers and proof of alien. Now that we have modern day technology, we can attain “proof” of alien life-form somewhere deep in outer space. But given the date 1692 in New England, if we were to even come in contact with aliens it would have been considered some supernatural phenomena, and even cause quite a bit of hysteria. That is what happened to the puritans in Salem village during the Salem Witch Trials, in Massachusetts, in the year 1962. The puritans of Salem village were extremely paranoid, and they believed that if something can’t be explained then it had the devils influence. So when a group of Salem girls spoke up about the devil and witches, the villagers of Salem went into a panicked frenzy. Truth of the matter is that there were no witches in Salem nor was the devil at war against Salem; the Salem Witch Trials were only a result of endless lies, conspiracies, and side effects of an illness.

Throughout history, there have been many cases of discriminatory accusations of people, including the Salem Witch Trials. The Salem Witch Trials were a string of trials, hearings and prosecutions of many people accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts between the dates of February 1692 and May 1693. The trials ended up leading to the execution of twenty people, men and women, but mainly women. The Salem Witch Trials that took place about three hundred years ago affected the lives of everyday civilians during that time in ways such as politically, religiously, economically, fearfully, mentally, and sometimes in other various other ways.

The Salem witch trials were a difficult time for the citizens of the Massachusetts Colony in the late seventeenth century. They were accused of practicing the Devil’s magic, which many believed to be real; so real that people were being imprisoned and executed for it. Between the years 1692 and 1693 there were over two hundred accusations and about 20 people and two dogs were killed altogether.

The Salem witch trials was a story of envy, lies, and the danger of the people. Others wouldn’t defend those accused, and if they did, they themselves were eventually charged as witches. In many ways, defending others was condemning yourself. Such was the case for John Proctor in “The Crucible”. John Proctor was someone who had made mistakes, but through his own crucible made peace with himself and defended the honor of himself and the others that would not admit to witchcraft.

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