The Salem Witch Trials is based on over twenty-five years of archival research--including the author's discovery of previously unknown documents--newly found cases and court records. From January 1692 to January 1697 this history unfolds a nearly day-by-day narrative of the crisis as the citizens of New England experienced it.
Stories of magic, superstition, and witchcraft were strictly forbidden in the little town of Salem Village. But a group of young girls ignored those rules, spellbound by the tales told by a woman named Tituba. When questioned about their activities, the terrified girls set off a whirlwind of controversy as they accused townsperson after townsperson of being witches. Author Shirley Jackson examines in careful detail this horrifying true story of accusations, trials, and executions that shook a community to its foundations.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials. It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, The Witches is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story -- the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.
"A pioneer work in…the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft." —Edmund S. Morgan, Yale University Confessing to "familiarity with the devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. The case of Ann Cole, who was "taken with very strange Fits," fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events at Salem. More than three hundred years later, the question "Why?" still haunts us. Why were these and other women likely witches—vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession? Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.
Tituba, a young house servant from the West Indies, allegedly influenced and encouraged occult activities among teenage girls in 17th century Massachusetts, which led to the infamous witch hunts of Salem. This book offers "an imaginative reconstruction of what might have been Tituba's past".--TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. "A valuable probe of how myths can feed hysteria".--THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD. 15 photos.
In 1692, four young girls from the Puritan town of Salem Village, Massachusetts, began acting strangely. They threw fits and cried out. They claimed that the spirits of some townspeople were hurting them. These townspeople were accused of witchcraft and put on trial. The punishment was hanging. When a poor woman and her five-year-old daughter were named as witches, Alice Ray knew it couldn’t be true. She believed they were innocent. But what could a young girl like Alice do to help? Would she be brave enough to stand up for what she knew was right? In the back of this book, you’ll find a script and instructions for putting on a reader’s theater performance of this adventure. At our companion website—www.lerneresource.com—you can download additional copies of the script plus sound effects, background images, and more ideas that will help make your reader’s theater performance a success.
Young readers “will be carried along by the sheer excitement of the story” of 17th-century slavery and witchcraft by the million-copy selling author (The New York Times). In 1688, Tituba and her husband, John, are sold to a Boston minister and sent to the strange world of Salem, Massachusetts. Rumors about witches are spreading like wildfire throughout the state, filling the heads of Salem’s superstitious, God-fearing residents. When the reverend’s suggestible young daughter, Betsey, starts having fits, the townsfolk declare it to be the devil’s work. Suspicion falls on Tituba, who can read fortunes and spin flax into thread so fine it seems like magic. When suspicion turns to hatred, Tituba finds herself in grave danger. Will she be judged guilty of witchcraft and hanged? Loosely based on accounts of the period and trial transcripts, Ann Petry’s compelling historical novel draws readers into the hysteria of America’s deadly witch hunts.
Tormented girls writhing in agony, stern judges meting out harsh verdicts, nineteen bodies swinging on Gallows Hill. The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion, individual and organized, which had been growing for more than a generation before the witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entangled in it. From rich and varied sources—many previously neglected or unknown—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum give us a picture of the events of 1692 more intricate and more fascinating than any other in the already massive literature on Salem. “Salem Possessed,” wrote Robin Briggs in The Times Literary Supplement, “reinterprets a world-famous episode so completely and convincingly that virtually all the previous treatments can be consigned to the historical lumber-room.” Not simply a dramatic and isolated event, the Salem outbreak has wider implications for our understanding of developments central to the American experience: the breakup of Puritanism, the pressures of land and population in New England towns, the problems besetting farmer and householder, the shifting role of the church, and the powerful impact of commercial capitalism.