salem witch trials research paper topics

83 Salem Witch Trials Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best salem witch trials topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ good research topics about salem witch trials, 👍 simple & easy salem witch trials essay titles, ❓ salem witch trials research questions.

Why Abigail Williams Is Blamed for the Salem Witch Trials This essay is going to analyze the reasons why Abigail Williams is to be blamed for the Salem witch trials and dreadful hangings. The narcissism and egocentrism of Abigail lead her to accuse others.
Salem Witch Trials and the Enlightenment Cultural Shift However, the further change in the attitude to the processes and their reconsideration indicated the strong impact of Enlightenment ideas and their spread over the region.
The Salem Witch Trials: A Time of Fear The outbreak began with the sudden and rather unusual illness of the daughter and niece of the local Reverend Samuel Parris.
Salem Witchcraft Hysteria: Crime Against Women In the “Was the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria a Product of Women’s Search for Power?” Kyle Koehler and Laurie Winn Carlson present the “pro” and “cons” arguments for this claim.
Witch Trials. Salem Possessed by Boyer and Nissenbaum Let us recall that the greater part of the complaints during the trials came from the Salem Village and the greater part of the accused came from Salem Town and the pattern of economic and […]
Salem Witch Trials: Differeenses From in Europe Witch trials in the new colonies of America were not a unique phenomenon in world history but the events of 1692 in Salem Massachusetts differed in scope and circumstances from in Europe, the origin of […]
The Salem Witch Trials in American History Blame ranges from the devil initially to puritan ministers encouraging the witch mania to bring support for the Church, and to the ideology of Puritanism itself, a strong belief that everything strange is the work […]
The Grave Injustices of the Salem Witchcraft Trials These thoughts enforced the belief in the existence of witchcraft in New England. The people of New England were in the middle of a war with the Indians.
Witchcraft Accusations, Trials, and Hysteria in Border Regions and Rural Areas in Western Europe To a great extent, this phenomenon can be attributed to the following factors: 1) official recognition of witchcraft and the activities of religious zealots who inspired the persecution of many people; 2) the stereotypes and […]
Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials As much as these trials can be referred to as the Salem trials, initial hearings were conducted in a number of towns in 1692.
Through Women’s Eyes: Salem Witch Trial The accusers took advantage of the ignorance of the people to make them believe that it was indeed supernatural causes which made the town of Salem suffer.
Salem Witch Trials Causes The writers explain that the problem began in the year 1691 and was marked by the behaviour of some girls in the same village who were involved in fortune telling.
Salem Witch Trials and Civil Rights Movement
The Infamous Salem Witch Trials
Behavior, Expectation, and Witch-Hunting During the Salem Witch Trials
Origins, Consequences, and Legacy of the Salem Witch Trials
The History, Causes, and Effects of the Salem Witch Trials
Reasons for Salem Witch Trials
Salem Witch Trials and Innocent People
Witchcraft and the Salem Witch Trials
Discrimination and the Salem Witch Trials
The Facts and Fictions of the Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials of Colonial History
Religion, Social Norms, and the Salem Witch Trials
The Psychic Crisis Theory of the Salem Witch Trials
Salem Witch Trials and Religious Superstition
Historical References From the Salem Witch Trials
Mass Hysteria During the Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials on Society and Religious Belief
Witchcraft and the Puritan Lifestyle in Salem During the Late 1600s in the Salem Witch Trials, a Book by Lori Lee Wilson
Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism in America
Factors That Influence the Salem Witch Trials
Salem Witch Trials and the Great Tragedy
Elizabeth Proctor and the Salem Witch Trials
Hygiene During the Salem Witch Trials
Cause, Effect, and Importance of the Salem Witch Trials
Persecution and the Salem Witch Trials
Individuals Who Played Different Roles in the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts
Salem Witch Trials and Modern Satanic Trials
McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials
Puritanism and Salem Witch Trials
Salem Witch Trials and Convulsive Ergotism
The Events and History of Salem Witch Trials
Anthropological and Sociological Effects of Puritanism and the 1692 Salem Witch Trials
Primary Sources for the Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials and the Women Victims
Puritan Literature and the Salem Witch Trials
Belonging: Salem Witch Trials and Society
The Factors That Influenced Salem Witch Trials
Horror During the Salem Witch Trials
Crucible: Salem Witch Trials and American Society
Salem Witch Trials and Forbidden Knowledge Witch
What Social Problem Did the Salem Witch Trials and Executions Solve?
Why and How Did the Salem Witch Trials Happen?
What Effect Did the Salem Witch Trials Have on American Literature?
Was Abigail Williams Solely Responsible for the Salem Witch Trials?
What Do the Salem Witch Trials Reveal About Gender and Power in the 17th Century in the US?
How Did the Puritans Affect the Trials of the Salem Witch?
What Was Ann Putnum’s Point of View About the Salem Witch Trials?
Were Salem Witch Trials a Peculiar Aberrant Moment in an Age of Superstition or Were They Something Else?
What Part Did Gender Roles Play During the Salem Witch Trials?
How Did the Salem Witch Trials Impact Modern Culture?
What Impact Did the Puritan’s Religious and Social Culture Have on the Proceedings of the Salem Witch Trials?
Were the Salem Witch Trials Spurred by Food Poisoning?
What Were the Causes and Effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
How Do the Salem Witch Trials Relate to the Changes Occurring During the Late 17th Century in Colonial British America?
What Caused the Salem Witch Trials Hysteria?
How Did the Salem Witch Trials Go Down?
What Happened During the Salem Witch Trials?
How Were McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials Related?
What Was the Significance of the Salem Witch Trials?
Is the Movie ‘the Crucible’ Historically Accurate to the Salem Witch Trials of 1693?
How Were Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Cloyce Arrested During the Salem Witch Trials?
What Were the Underlying Causes of the Persecution of People During the Salem Witch Trials?
Do the Salem Witch Trials Which Occurred in 1662 and 1663 Have an Explanation Other Than Superstition and Religion?
How the Salem Witch Trials Affected How We View Witches Today?
What Was the Best Way to Avoid Trial and Execution for Witchcraft During the Salem Witch Trials?
Are Witch Trials Legitimate Today? Was It Legal in the Period of the Salem Witch Trials?
What Were the Events That Led to the Salem Witch Trials?
Had the Puritan Religion Itself Been the Real Culprit in the Salem Witch Trials?
How Does the Author Laurie Winn Carlson Speak About the Salem Witch Trials?
What Did the Leaders of Salem Have to Gain Through the Exposure of So-Called Witches?
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Crusades Research Topics
God Paper Topics
Gender Inequality Research Topics
Holy Spirit Titles
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Suggestions on Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics

The Salem witch trials were prosecutions conducted of people indicted for witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people faced accusations of witchcraft. Thirty were found guilty, and nineteen of them were executed by hanging. Fourteen of the victims were women and five men, but an unknown number of innocents were injured as well.

Salem witch trials research paper topics

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Salem Witch Trials

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 29, 2023 | Original: November 4, 2011

The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts, a special court convened in Salem to hear the cases; the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months.

By September 1692, the hysteria had begun to abate and public opinion turned against the trials. Though the Massachusetts General Court later annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families, bitterness lingered in the community, and the painful legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.

What Caused the Salem Witch Trials?: Context & Origins

Belief in the supernatural—and specifically in the devil’s practice of giving certain humans (witches) the power to harm others in return for their loyalty—had emerged in Europe as early as the 14th century, and was widespread in colonial New England . In addition, the harsh realities of life in the rural Puritan community of Salem Village (present-day Danvers, Massachusetts ) at the time included the after-effects of a British war with France in the American colonies in 1689, a recent smallpox epidemic, fears of attacks from neighboring Native American tribes and a longstanding rivalry with the more affluent community of Salem Town (present-day Salem).

Amid these simmering tensions, the Salem witch trials would be fueled by residents’ suspicions of and resentment toward their neighbors, as well as their fear of outsiders.

Did you know? In an effort to explain by scientific means the strange afflictions suffered by those "bewitched" Salem residents in 1692, a study published in Science magazine in 1976 cited the fungus ergot (found in rye, wheat and other cereals), which toxicologists say can cause symptoms such as delusions, vomiting and muscle spasms.

In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms, including Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott and Mary Warren.

In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris’ Caribbean slave, Tituba, along with two other women—the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn—whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

Salem Witch Trial Victims: How the Hysteria Spread

The three accused witches were brought before the magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions, screaming and writhing. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain conviction by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches acting alongside her in service of the devil against the Puritans.

As hysteria spread through the community and beyond into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused, including Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse—both regarded as upstanding members of church and community—and the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good.

Like Tituba, several accused “witches” confessed and named still others, and the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the newly appointed governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties.

Presided over by judges including Hathorne, Samuel Sewall and William Stoughton, the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2; she was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill in Salem Town. Five more people were hanged that July; five in August and eight more in September. In addition, seven other accused witches died in jail, while the elderly Giles Corey (Martha’s husband) was pressed to death by stones after he refused to enter a plea at his arraignment.

Salem Witch Trials: Conclusion and Legacy

Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence (or testimony about dreams and visions), his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College (and Cotton’s father) later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that “It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned.”

Amid waning public support for the trials, Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with dwindling intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.

In January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting for the tragedy of the Salem witch trials; the court later deemed the trials unlawful, and the leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role in the process. The damage to the community lingered, however, even after Massachusetts Colony passed legislation restoring the good names of the condemned and providing financial restitution to their heirs in 1711.

Indeed, the vivid and painful legacy of the Salem witch trials endured well into the 20th century, when Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692 in his play “The Crucible” (1953), using them as an allegory for the anti-Communist “witch hunts” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. A memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials was dedicated on August 5, 1992 by author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

HISTORY Vault: Salem Witch Trials

Experts dissect the facts—and the enduring mysteries—surrounding the courtroom trials of suspected witches in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692.

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The salem witch trials.

Abram C. Van Engen Abram C. Van Engen Washington University in St. Louis
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.139
Published online: 22 November 2016

The Salem witch trials have gripped American imaginations ever since they occurred in 1692. At the end of the 17th century, after years of mostly resisting witch hunts and witch trial prosecutions, Puritans in New England suddenly found themselves facing a conspiracy of witches in a war against Satan and his minions. What caused this conflict to erupt? Or rather, what caused Puritans to think of themselves as engaged, at that moment, in such a cosmic battle? These are some of the mysteries that the Salem witch trials have left behind, taken up and explored not just by each new history of the event but also by the literary imaginations of many American writers.

The primary explanations of Salem set the crisis within the context of larger developments in Puritan society. Though such developments could be traced to the beginning of Puritan settlement in New England, most commentators focus on shifts occurring near the end of the century. This was a period of intense economic change, with new markets emerging and new ways of making money. It was also a time when British imperial interests were on the rise, tightening and expanding an empire that had, at times, been somewhat loosely held together. In the midst of those expansions, British colonists and settlers faced numerous wars on their frontiers, especially in northern New England against French Catholics and their Wabanaki allies. Finally, New England underwent, resented, and sometimes resisted intense shifts in government policy as a result of the changing monarchy in London. Under James II, Massachusetts Bay lost its original charter, which had upheld the Puritan way for over fifty years. A new government imposed royal rule and religious tolerance. With the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution, the Massachusetts Bay government carried on with no official charter or authority from 1689 until 1691. When a new charter arrived during the midst of the Salem witch hunt, it did not restore all the privileges, positions, or policies of the original “New England Way,” and many lamented what they had lost. In other words, in 1692, New England faced economic, political, and religious uncertainty while suffering from several devastating battles on its northern frontier. All of these factors have been used to explain Salem.

When Governor William Phips finally halted the trials, nineteen had been executed, five had died in prison, and one man had been pressed to death for refusing to speak. Protests began almost immediately with the first examinations of the accused, and by the time the trials ended, almost all agreed that something had gone terribly wrong. Even so, the population could not necessarily agree on an explanation for what had occurred. Publishing any talk of the trials was prohibited, but that ban was quickly broken. Since 1695, interpretations have rolled from the presses, and American literature—in poems, plays, and novels—has attempted to make its own sense and use of what one scholar calls the mysterious and terrifying “specter of Salem.”

witch-hunting
New England
17th century
cultural memory

What Happened in Salem

The fits began in January 1692 . Betty Parris, the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, and Abigail Williams, the minister’s eleven-year-old niece, were the first to be afflicted. As members of the minister’s household, they presented an embarrassing situation. The fits suggested that Satan could make his way even into the pastor’s house, possessing or demonizing beyond the minister’s ability to protect or defend. Moreover, Puritan theology taught that such afflictions usually came as chastisements from God, requiring the minister, Samuel Parris, to examine his ways and repent. Either because of his embarrassment or because he genuinely repented, Parris did not suspect witches for many weeks. He prayed. He fasted. He waited. After more than a month of continued fits, he finally called a doctor. When the doctor pronounced the girls bewitched, it both relieved a burden and added a new one. The girls were not possessed; they were attacked. But who the devil was bewitching them?

Mary Sibley, Parris’s neighbor, knew one way to find out. She ordered Parris’s slaves Tituba and John Indian to bake a witch cake—a rye bread mixed with urine from the afflicted children. This was called white magic, or countermagic, and it was long used and widely practiced in Puritan New England. Though uniformly condemned by the clergy (they believed all magic, for whatever purpose, worked only through the power of Satan), the practice of countermagic continued through the 17th and 18th centuries. Lay people did not necessarily associate magic with the devil, but approached it more pragmatically: if it healed it was good, and if it harmed it was bad.

The witch cake Sibley ordered apparently worked. When the dog ate it, the children identified their tormenters. It also produced collateral damage, however, for the same day the witch cake was baked, two more children fell ill: twelve-year-old Ann Putnam Jr., and seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard, the doctor’s maid. The four girls collectively named three witches, and Samuel Parris had good reason to be relieved. Now, finally, he could lay the blame elsewhere. Not only were these witches the ones at work, but Sibley’s condemned usage of countermagic had “raised the devil” in Salem. He rebuked Sibley and forced her to confess before the church. Then he used the evidence she procured through countermagic to begin proceedings against the witches.

The first suspects were the predictable ones: Tituba, a slave from the West Indies; Sarah Good, a poor beggar who offended everyone; and Sarah Osborne, a bedridden widow who had scandalized the town by marrying her servant. 1 As many have shown, witch hunts were often directed primarily at women, and especially at poor, marginalized women or those who had transgressed social norms. As Carol Karlsen succinctly writes: “The story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women … Especially in its Western incarnation, witchcraft confronts us with ideas about women, with fears about women, with the place of women in society, and with women themselves. It confronts us too with systematic violence against women.” 2 Salem thus began as a limited witch hunt aimed at notorious women, a ritual that was not very common in New England compared to Europe, but one which certainly had its precedents. The community would purge itself of those who did not fit, and then it would reunite through the process of uncovering and overcoming the devil. 3 The local magistrates, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Bartholomew Gedney, presided over the first phase of examinations. Beginning with Sarah Good, Hathorne interrogated the defendants in an attempt to force confessions. Questions led with an assumption of guilt. Rather than asking whether Good injured the four children, Hathorne simply asked why she did. Good claimed her innocence, and each denial of guilt evoked a series of fits from the four afflicted girls. Finally, Good accused Osborne, attempting to shift the blame, but when the magistrates examined Osborne, much the same occurred.

It was when the court finally heard from Tituba that Salem exploded into an unprecedented affair. Under Hathorne’s pressure, Tituba confessed to being a witch, and that confession yielded several dramatic results. First, the afflictions of the girls ceased, confirming that confessions were the best way both to prevent further harm to the girls and to legitimate the actions of the court. Second, Tituba’s confession enabled her to detail the actions of other witches, her supposed accomplices. According to the trusted Puritan theologian William Perkins, a confessed witch who accused others offered valid testimony against them. Tituba explained that Good and Osborne had forced her to harm the girls, and the court believed her. Third, Tituba offered several elements in her confession—all guided by Judge Hathorne—that would become routine in future confessions: the devil’s book, the witches’ meetings, the description of a “black man,” Satanic masses, and the naming of other suspects. 4 Finally, and most significantly, Tituba claimed that Good and Osborne did not act alone. Tituba eventually testified to a total of nine witches, though she could not say who they were. Suddenly, a full witch conspiracy was underway, a war of Satan against the Puritan churches of New England. To survive, the godly would have to unmask their foes. 5

Ann Putnam Jr., took the lead in identifying these other witches, who turned out not to conform to the usual stereotypes. The next accused included Dorothy Good, Sarah’s four-year-old daughter; Martha Cory, a member of Samuel Parris’s church; and Rebecca Nurse, a widely respected matriarch, member of the nearby Salem Town church, and godly grandmother in the community. Meanwhile, the afflicted multiplied. Adults began to suffer fits, including Ann’s mother and Tituba’s husband, John Indian, and the fits spread to Mary Warren, the servant of John and Elizabeth Proctor. John Proctor responded by beating her, which seemed to cure her of the problem, and apparently he proclaimed that if he were left alone with John Indian, he could beat the devil out of him as well. But when Mary recovered and turned against the afflicted, the afflicted turned against her: she was soon accused of witchcraft herself, revealing in its early days how difficult it would be to oppose the supposedly bewitched. 6 Before the judges, Mary claimed that “the afflicted persons did but dissemble.” Fits immediately ensued, so convincing in their performance that Mary reacted with fits of her own and was taken back to prison, unable to speak. In court the next day, Mary confessed to signing the devil’s book, but only because she had been tricked into doing it by the Proctors. Then she accused Giles Cory. She rejoined the ranks of the afflicted and spun out accusations in tandem with them, saving her own life but costing the lives of many more.

With the confession of Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield, who would also soon join the afflicted, the trials turned their attention to Maine. Hobbs claimed to have become a witch in the woods of Casco Bay. All along the Maine frontier, the English Puritans were losing in a long war against the French and their Wabanaki allies. Wabanaki raids repeatedly wiped out Puritan towns, and several of the afflicted girls were orphans and refugees from the conflict. With Maine’s woes now present in the courtroom, accusations focused on the former Salem minister who had moved back to that frontier: George Burroughs. Burroughs was a Puritan minister with Baptist leanings who had preached in the divided Salem Village church a decade before; he had a reputation for mistreating wives and an uncanny ability to survive Indian raids. Both aspects made him suspect. At Salem, he became identified as the ringleader of the conspiracy, the minister of an inverted covenant of witches. He presided over black masses and bloody sacraments. He killed wives. He bewitched neighbors. He recruited the formerly godly to war against New England. When the court took up his case, more than thirty witnesses volunteered to damn him.

Until June, the examinations of the accused witches had not been able to proceed to actual trials because the colony lacked an official charter and an ability to try capital offenses. In June, the newly appointed governor, William Phips, arrived from England with a new charter, heard about the crisis in Salem, and immediately established a Court of Oyer and Terminer (“to hear and determine”). Stocked with high-ranking officials from Boston, this court could move from the initial depositions, testimonials, and examinations to grand jury indictments and finally jury trials. The court first tried Bridget Bishop on June 2. Bishop denied her guilt, which would prove a good way to die in Salem. The trial proceeded quickly, and on June 10, she was hanged.

At that point, Salem paused. Accusations and examinations had swept up a series of accused witches, mostly from Salem Village and its immediate vicinity. But now it had executed its first witch, a woman who disconcertingly refused to confess even on the scaffold. Before proceeding, the magistrates wanted some approval from Puritan ministers. Asked for their thoughts on the matter, several prominent ministers took two days to respond. Their response, “The Return of Several Ministers,” suggested caution, especially in the use of “spectral evidence” (seeing someone’s specter, or shape, harming either oneself or another). The strange use of spectral evidence—the claims of the afflicted to see, experience, know, and testify about the invisible world, along with the court’s reliance on such testimony to suspect, convict, and execute the accused—would become one of Salem’s most anomalous mysteries. The judges at Salem approached spectral evidence in direct violation of precedent and principle. Yet although “The Return of Several Ministers” urged caution in this regard, it did not overtly condemn the proceedings or the judges and ended by encouraging a “vigorous prosecution.” It was all the court wanted to hear. Ignoring all other ambiguities and cautions, the court pressed on, turning its attention in a second phase of trials from Salem Village to the nearby town of Andover, where a great number of accused persons quickly confessed—many doing so explicitly to save their lives. 7

The suffering of the accused did not begin with that first hanging of Bridget Bishop. It began rather with the accusation itself, the taint of dark magic and ungodly ways, the loss of reputation. For those like Rebecca Nurse, who was a church member, the suffering continued with an official excommunication before execution. And suffering extended elsewhere as well, to the forfeiture of property and constrained conditions for surviving children, and to the prisons, which were wretched, unsanitary, overcrowded, and dangerous. The first to die at Salem was not Bridget Bishop but Sarah Osborne, the bedridden widow, who perished in jail a month before her case could even be heard. In total, nineteen would be executed, one man would be pressed to death between boards, and at least five would die in jail before Governor Phips, under growing opposition, would finally close down the Court of Oyer and Terminer—much to the dismay and indignation of its presiding judge, William Stoughton. Phips created another court to hear the remaining cases, and this second court cleared the jails, refused to accept former confessions, and acquitted all but three. Governor Phips immediately reprieved the convicted three. No one else would die for witchcraft in New England.

Explanations of the Salem Witch Trials

Most scholars agree on the basic narrative of the Salem witch trials. 8 Why it happened, however, is far from clear. Disagreements abound, with alternative explanations for the afflicted, the accused, the judges, the ministers, the magistrates, and the proceedings as a whole. Much about Salem begs for explanation. Not only was the witch hunt larger and more extensive than anything New England had ever seen, but those in authority acted quite differently than had their colleagues in prior cases. Young girls and others had fallen into fits and afflictions before; in fact, almost simultaneously with Salem, the same kinds of fits with the same sorts of accusations were beginning among a small group of girls in Hartford, Connecticut. Yet neither in neighboring Hartford in 1692 nor in the previous six decades did such afflictions lead to stuffed jails and mass executions.

No one has better laid out the full culture of witchcraft in Puritan New England than John Demos, and in the updated version of his book Entertaining Satan , Demos emphasizes two fundamental “themes”: that witchcraft in New England belonged to “the regular business of life in pre-modern times”—a part of the basic functioning of community—and that witchcraft was “a profoundly ‘emotional’ phenomenon (with fear and anger at its center, and lots of affect-laden fantasy flowing out in all directions).” 9 Yet Demos focuses on sporadic witch accusations and trials across New England, not massive witch hunts, and he offers no account of Salem. At Salem, something beyond the regular business of life broke out. What made Salem go so wrong?

Three prominent and overlapping explanations have come to the fore, each emphasizing a particular aspect. One early and influential account laid all the blame on economic development and communal division. In Salem Possessed , Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum saw Salem Village at war with forces of modernization that threatened a close-knit, traditional agricultural society. Mapping the houses of the afflicted against the houses of the accused, they found that most of the afflicted came from the western, more agricultural areas of Salem Village, while the accused tended to come from the eastern, more merchant-oriented society of Salem Town. From this map and other evidence, Boyer and Nissenbaum claimed that the coming of modern capitalism caused irreparable harm to the self-understanding and social fabric of the community, leading to a witch hunt. The cause of the Salem witch hunt was finally the economy, along with all the social factors that economic division and development entails. 10

A second major interpretation puts the primary emphasis on political instability. In 1684 , King James II revoked the colony’s founding charter and imposed a new government with a royally appointed governor named Edmond Andros. Andros was everything the Puritans hated: an autocratic, aristocratic Anglican who ignored the locals’ opinions and advice. When the Glorious Revolution occurred in 1689 , replacing James II with William and Mary, Massachusetts’s colonists jailed Andros and packed him off to England. From 1689 through 1691 , the colony had no charter and thus no official government. During this interim, it returned to the administration of the first charter, waiting for the outcome of negotiations between Increase Mather and the new king and queen. The new charter, which arrived in the midst of the Salem panic, mixed features of the first and second governments. Returning many rights to the Massachusetts citizens, it nonetheless retained a royally appointed governor and still required religious tolerance. Many opposed the charter, and some began to wonder if Puritan New England had run its course. This political instability, some have argued, caused the witch hunt. Salem can be understood as an attempt to reclaim a Puritan New England ideal that was constantly under attack during hated, missing, or compromised governmental charters. 11

Finally, others have seen a similar mentality at work, but from a different cause: New England was under attack, but much more literally. In King William’s War ( 1688–1697 ), New England suffered devastating defeats at the hands of the French and Indians along its northern border. Almost every attempt to mount a counteroffensive failed miserably. Towns were razed, casualties mounted, and captives were taken north and forced into Catholicism. In the guise of his minions, Satan wanted to destroy the godly community, and because of New England’s sins, God was allowing Satan to succeed. No one would be safe without a thoroughgoing reformation. Closer to Salem, these northern wars touched the lives of several participants in the witch hunt: some of the afflicted were war refugees, orphaned and traumatized; some of the accused, especially George Burroughs, had close ties to Maine; and some of the judges were responsible for terrible defeats and financial losses during the wars. Hunting witches allowed the judges to fight Satan on their own turf and win; and for the afflicted—several of whom may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—Salem might have made them feel that someone was finally taking up their cause. 12

Each of these explanations has been used to make sense of Salem, and all have been found wanting. 13 More recently, scholars have emphasized the role of religion in accounts that combine features from all previous explanations. Even before Mary Beth Norton highlighted the wars of the northern frontier, Richard Godbeer noted them and combined them with several additional factors that served as “a series of external forces assault[ing] the colonists, imperiling not only their integrity as a political and spiritual community but even their very survival.” This “common trauma,” he noted, was often described in the language of invasion and external threat. 14 In Satan and Salem , Benjamin Ray similarly argues that “far from being precipitated by a single key person or circumstance, the Salem crisis was the result of a perfect storm of factors.” 15 That storm of factors, he explains, shared a common language of Satan’s attack. Likewise, Emerson Baker, publishing the same year as Ray, titled his comprehensive account of the crisis A Storm of Witchcraft . This idea of a perfect “storm” emphasizes the coming together of multiple factors. King William’s War certainly matters, as Norton demonstrates; but so do other factors, such as economic instability, the lack of a stable government, the inexperience of a new governor, the past failings of ruling magistrates, and the personalities of Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, and many others. Overall, it seems, what mattered most was that New England Puritans, in the midst of these crises—and partly as a result of them—saw themselves as God’s chosen people at war with a newly unleashed and angered Satan. It was a war they wanted to win, and the most self-assured Puritans became convinced that they could win this war by purging the land of all those who allied themselves with Satan and Satan’s cause. They came to see the devil anywhere, and they sought to defeat him everywhere.

The Many Participants in the Salem Witch Trials

Beyond attempting to explain why Salem happened at all, scholars have also sought to examine the particular mysteries of the various groups involved: the afflicted, the accused, the magistrates, and the ministers. These groups often have defining characteristics, though they also divide into their own subgroups (local magistrates vs. Boston magistrates, for example, or the ministers in support of the trials vs. the ministers who opposed them). In addition, there are several individuals who significantly affected Salem: Samuel Parris, the town’s minister; Tituba, the minister’s slave who first confessed; Thomas Putnam Jr., the man whose family seemed particularly afflicted and whose depositions were especially successful against the accused; Governor Phips, who supported the trials, then closed them down, then tried to claim that he never knew what was happening; Increase Mather and his son Cotton, the prominent Boston ministers who divided over Salem while trying to make it appear as though they actually agreed. These personalities and groups have all received their own attention as important factors at Salem.

Salem begins with the afflicted: there are no trials without the seizures, screams, and fits. These afflictions began with young girls who would remain the core group of the afflicted, but they spread to a host of others, including males and adults (such as John Indian and Ann Putnam, Sr.). What explains the bewitched? A variety of notions have been advanced, and the only one consistently refuted has been the one that dominates popular imagination: ergot poisoning. According to this idea, the afflicted consumed a fungus that grows on moldy rye bread, causing symptoms similar to those of LSD. All scholars rule out this possibility. Much more likely is that the girls simply faked it. The very evidence that rules out ergot poisoning—the intervals of affliction, the lack of serious harm to the afflicted, and the idea that these afflictions seemed to be able to start and stop on command—suggests the possibility of fraud. All scholars agree that at least some fraud was involved, and certain members of the afflicted group, such as Mary Warren, seem particularly suspect. The Proctors’ servant ceased having fits, faced an accusation of witchcraft, became “afflicted” all over again, then laid the blame on the Proctors. Such survival strategies seem to indicate clear cases of fraud. 16

At the same time, the kinds of stress Mary endured could cause mental breakdowns that might blur the lines between fraud, fatigue, and fear. If friends, family members, respected ministers, and magistrates all believe that you are tormented by specters, at what point do you begin to believe them? So, too, hysteria can be contagious. Is it fraud to fall when others fall, or fear when others fear? Such lines can sometimes be hard to draw. As Emerson Baker usefully points out, cases of contagious fear, anxiety, and hysteria have broken out in modern times as well, even as recently as 2011 in New York public schools amid teenage girls who suffered symptoms quite similar to those of Salem. 17 The afflictions at Salem may have begun as genuine symptoms of anxiety or PTSD; at court, these fits might have continued as fraud, especially when the magistrates required repeat performances of affliction to convict the accused. 18

As for the accused, how did their names come to the afflicted? The first three names make sense: they fit the usual description of witches. But once witchcraft expanded to church members and Puritan ministers, does any rationale explain how one person came to be accused while another person escaped? Theories abound, beginning primarily with the economic disparities proposed in Salem Possessed , but most recent scholarship settles on the idea of religious division within the community. When the witch hunt began in Salem Village, the afflicted came primarily from families who supported Samuel Parris, and the accused came primarily from families who opposed him. As the witch hunt passed on from Salem Village to surrounding communities, accusers seemed to seek out those who were religiously corrupt in some way—those who failed to attend church regularly, who did not participate in sacraments, who failed to become full members of a church, or who had some kind of connection to Quakers, Baptists, or other religious dissidents. This religious rationale does not explain all accusations, but it seems to make the most sense of identifying the accused.

When the accused stood before the court, they came into the presence of another influential group: the judges. It is one thing for young girls to become afflicted and accuse others of witchcraft; it is quite another for court magistrates to believe them and to prosecute almost every name they produced. Recently, attention has turned from the local antagonisms of the afflicted and the accused to the role of the judges and magistrates who seemed to push the trials forward. As Baker has written, “[N]o one would have died without the sanction of the judges. The judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer hold the answers to many of Salem’s riddles.” 19 These judges have become all the more interesting lately because scholarship has demonstrated just how oddly they behaved. At Salem, magistrates disregarded both precedent and advice. In the previous sixty years of Puritan settlement, there had been sixty-one prosecutions for witchcraft, with at most sixteen convictions and executions, a rate of 26.2 percent. 20 For many years, Puritan magistrates and ministers had prevented the conviction and killing of supposed witches, in part because they had a different understanding of witchcraft than did most commoners. The elite defined the deed as a covenant with the devil; most of the non-elite saw it as a harmful use of magic. Common citizens brought their testimony of harm to magistrates, but harm in itself proved nothing. Successful prosecutions required either a confession or two witnesses to confirm that someone had made a pact with the devil. For sixty years, confessions were hard to come by and pacts with the devil were hard to prove. More important, in the previous several decades of Puritan New England, ministers and magistrates were decidedly uneasy about spectral evidence; it could identify a potential suspect , but it could never be used to convict. At Salem, spectral evidence convicted. It was relied upon as insight into the unknown, as valid testimony of the invisible world. The changed use of spectral evidence would be one of the strangest and most unsettling aspects of Salem, one that informs the work of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and an element that scholars continue trying to explain. 21 But spectral evidence was not the only anomaly. New England law had previously limited accusations of witchcraft and other crimes by requiring the posting of a bond; in order to curtail frivolous cases, people had to pay money in order to lodge a case with the court. At Salem, that requirement was dropped. As a result of the conditions surrounding witchcraft before Salem, not only were there fewer complaints made in previous decades, but those complaints were far less successfully prosecuted. For sixty years, commoners and lay people had pressed for the conviction of witches, and for just as many years their political and religious superiors had pressed back even harder. 22

At Salem, all of these precedents would be ignored or reversed. Bonds were not required for many months, swelling the number of complaints. Confessions, some of which were produced by illegal torture, saved the lives of those who confessed. Those doomed by their denials of guilt, meanwhile, were often convicted almost exclusively on the basis of spectral evidence. As the accused protested their innocence, the afflicted girls would fall, twist, scream and writhe, pointing to an invisible tormenter. Since all could see the torment itself, two witnesses of witchcraft were not required—assuming, that is, that one could trust the spectral evidence. The court ignored the tomes on witchcraft that previous courts so carefully studied. Rather than tamping down and resisting the common people’s desire for prosecution, the magistrates at Salem accepted and encouraged it. Where the conviction rate hovered just above 26 percent in previous decades, the rate at Salem would be 100 percent. 23 No one who came to trial would be acquitted. As one scholar aptly explains, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for whatever motives, the Salem judges wanted convictions.” 24

Why did the judges want convictions? Political instability may offer some psychological rationale for the behavior of court judges: several of them had worked for Andros’s hated government, and some had been involved in the defeats of King William’s War. Perhaps these judges needed a way to prove they were on the side of godly Puritans, while also finding a conspiracy of witches to be a handy excuse for their failures. 25 Religious tensions and perhaps a sense of spiritual unworthiness among these second-generation stalwart Puritans may also play a role: five of the nine judges had attended Harvard College in preparation for the ministry, but all had abandoned that path for other pursuits. In addition, as Baker reveals, these judges were mostly related to each other through marriage. The only unrelated judge was Nathaniel Saltonstall, and Saltonstall was the only judge to resign from the court in protest. 26 Yet it is important to realize that all the judges seemed to have been transformed at Salem: several had been involved previously in acquitting accused witches, questioning the spectral evidence they would come to rely upon at Salem. Why they suddenly sought convictions is difficult to determine, but if the judges had not so desperately wanted the prosecution to succeed, the witch hunt could never have taken off. For whatever reason, the magistrates must have had a great deal to gain in 1692 .

While the judges may have suffered from paranoia and guilt about the wars or their involvement in Andros’s government, on a more local level, the afflicted, their parents, and the prosecutors all seemed to dwell in a paranoid, anxious, and traumatized community. The records of the Salem witch trials are an endless testimony of suffering. Loss, despair, anxiety, and sorrow pour out of the testimonies. 27 And all of that heartache could finally be given an object, a scapegoat—someone to blame. Without witchcraft, all these losses would register as afflictions requiring repentance; but with witches to blame, the guilt could be alleviated. Rather than losing children because of one’s sins, such losses could be understood as Satan’s attack, possibly launched against someone precisely because that person had remained faithful to God. Witches, in other words, changed the dynamics and experience of loss.

That may not have been the explicit rationale for many witnesses, but it certainly seems to have guided the thinking of Samuel Parris. Parris, the embattled minister whose children started throwing themselves at open flames, was the fourth pastor of Salem Village. The first three had short tenures, invited by one faction but opposed by another. Few had their salaries paid; all would leave Salem for less than stellar careers; and one, George Burroughs, would be hanged as a witch. Salem Village offered one of the lowest ministerial salaries in the entire colony, and its reputation of bitter factional divisions preceded it. In 1689 , no one with an actual divinity degree could be lured to its parish. Samuel Parris had completed three years at Harvard before leaving to take over his father’s plantation in Barbados, which quickly failed. He tried his hand as a merchant in Boston and failed there, too. Finally, Salem Village asked him to preach. For a year, he wrangled about the terms of his salary, his wood supply, and the ownership of the parsonage. In his first sermon, he demanded that congregants love, serve, and obey him. He told them that by bringing sacraments to the church (allowed for the first time since it was established), he was removing the Lord’s reproach. Then he removed the Halfway Covenant that allowed God-fearing congregants who were not full members to baptize their children. These “halfway” congregants, whom Parris railed against, would either have to become full members by making a profession of faith before the church and undergoing the church’s scrutiny, or they would have to forgo baptizing their children. It was clear from the start that Samuel Parris would not heal this divided church.

The trouble with Parris seems especially evident from his preaching. Parris spoke unambiguously of the good and the bad, the godly and the ungodly, assigning “halfway” God-fearing congregants consistently to the latter category. As scholars have shown, Parris posed no neutral ground: all people were either of God or the devil, and his goal was to parse and separate. 28 Lacking the hesitation and self-doubt of many other Puritan ministers, Samuel Parris often presented himself as a Christ-like figure opposed by anti-Christian forces. From the moment he first began preaching, Parris spoke of cosmic battles. He emphasized Satan’s attack against the godly and interpreted resistance as the diabolical plot of the devil. On the Sunday before the first fits began in his home, Parris preached explicitly that Satan was attempting to “pull down” the church. Frequently, the concerned faction supporting Parris met at his house to discuss the crisis facing the church, strategizing how to deal with all those who opposed him. It makes sense, then, that his house is where the fits began. Without Parris, there would be no context for believing the testimony of the minister’s slave that a conspiracy of witches gathered outside his home and sought to overthrow his church. 29

But Parris was not the only Puritan to see Satan at work, gathering forces for a violent battle against godly New England. Nowhere does this perception of war appear more clearly than in the introductory frame of Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World ( 1693 ). Written at the behest of the governor, deputy governor, and chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials, this text chooses five cases, selectively presents the evidence, and defends the court in its work for Christ. The overall defense of the court’s actions lay in the broader context the book establishes: “The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories,” Cotton Mather explains. Because they brought the gospel to Satan’s lands, Satan had become especially enraged and now pursued a grand plot to destroy the godly society that the Puritans had built. Like Samuel Parris, Cotton Mather’s book couched the Salem witch trials within the context of a cosmic battle.

Governor Phips liked that account of things. He sent Wonders of the Invisible World to London as the official history of Salem and prohibited anyone else from publishing on the subject once the trials ended. But the very need to silence opposition proved how few agreed with Cotton Mather. Resistance started mounting immediately, propelled by the case of Rebecca Nurse; during her examination, more than three dozen citizens signed a petition proclaiming her innocence and defending her good character. Petitions continued to grow during the trials, with more and more brave persons signing documents attempting to save the lives of their neighbors. No petition worked. Yet the rising cry of protest did finally have an effect, bringing the noise of opposition and resistance to those who held the most power in the colony. Soon Increase Mather joined the protests, publishing his own account of Salem while the trials were underway. In Cases of Conscience , Increase specifically delegitimized the court’s use of spectral evidence, undercutting the primary source of convictions. That book, along with the protests of several leading Boston ministers, finally convinced Governor Phips to stop the trials.

The trips to Salem by Increase and Cotton Mather reveal their different mentalities. When Cotton Mather went to Salem, he witnessed a group execution that included the supposed “King of Hell,” George Burroughs. At the scaffold, Burroughs composed himself with so much calm and seeming godliness, including a perfect recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (thought impossible for a witch), that many in the crowd began to turn against the executions. Burroughs looked more like a Protestant saint from the pages of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs than like a satanic wizard bent on the destruction of Christianity. 30 As the crowd started to protest, Cotton Mather mounted a horse and convinced the crowd that the devil often appeared as an angel of light, winning them back to the executions, which then continued.

Yet that line of thinking—that the devil might appear as an angel of light—could also damn the very trials it was meant to support. In fact, such an idea served Increase Mather’s argument rejecting spectral evidence. If the devil could appear in any shape, then perhaps the devil had taken the shape of someone innocent. Crying out against specters might be playing right into the devil’s hands. When Increase Mather traveled to Salem, therefore, he did not go to encourage the executions; instead, he visited the jails and spoke with the accused, including many who had confessed. There he learned about the extreme pressures applied to them and found that many had confessed because they believed it would save their lives. While talking with them, he witnessed the suffering of innocent persons in terrible, sickening jails, and he turned against the trials for good. When Increase returned home, he wrote the book that would help bring them to a close.

The mysteries of Salem are many, various, and difficult to solve. Why were these people afflicted? Why were those people accused? What explains the motivations and behavior of Samuel Parris, and how much was Parris’s temperament able to set the terms that enabled the tragedy to occur? Why did the judges reverse decades of precedent in an effort to convict and execute as many as they could? And how did the ministers respond? Who supported the trials, who opposed them, and why? These kinds of questions have produced contested answers, all attempting to balance the relative weight of importance behind each actor or cause. Salem is filled with questions. And while extensive records survive, those records seldom offer answers able to settle all disputes.

Reading and Remembering the Salem Witch Trials

The abiding mystery of Salem seems one reason for its enduring legacy. Governor Phips attempted to ban any discussion of Salem, but within three years that ban was violated, and no future silencing could take place. Thomas Maule, a Quaker, was the first to challenge the official proscription, with Truth Held Forth and Maintained in 1695 . The book had a long chapter criticizing the government for its handling of Salem. It was burned and Maule was arrested, spending several months in prison before facing many of the same judges and prosecutors he had attacked. Yet Maule stood by what he wrote. First, he defended its claims; then, slyly, he argued that his authorship could not be proven: anyone could have put his name on the title page. The grand jury found him not guilty, and the ban was broken. From that moment forward, critiques and reassessments of Salem have poured from the presses. 31

Yet many of these skeptical voices were not so clear about what exactly had happened: mistakes were made, to be sure, but the precise nature of those errors could not be determined. The minister John Hale, for example, who was first an advocate and later a skeptic at Salem, explained, “Such was the darkness of the day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents [i.e., precedents], that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.” 32 Apologies eventually appeared from many involved, including the jury foreman, the afflicted girl Ann Putnam Jr., and the judge Samuel Sewall, who desired “to take the blame and shame of it.” 33 Yet most of these apologies came in Hale’s variety; they were, for the most part, apologies of the confused. Something had gone wrong, but who was to blame? In 1706 , Ann Putnam Jr., now twenty-nine, desired “to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness from God and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence.” But she did not say she faked her afflictions. Instead, she explained, “[I]t was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time.” 34

The darkness of Salem often seems the aspect most remembered today. In popular histories, the Puritans usually appear as stock figures of backward superstition—hateful, unenlightened religious bigots who saw witches in every shadow and enjoyed nothing so much as a good hanging. 35 As Gretchen Adams has shown, such accounts of Salem emerged most prominently in the nation’s first schoolbooks, when American historians praised their country for its moral progress. 36 Yet many have demonstrated that such an assessment fails to fit the evidence: after all, many of those involved at Salem welcomed the new sciences emerging in Europe. Some were among the most intelligent and advanced figures of their day. Cotton Mather, for example, would become the first New Englander inducted into the British Royal Society, and his work promoting smallpox inoculation in later years would save far more lives than Salem lost. As Sarah Rivett has carefully demonstrated, the way in which Puritans approached evidence and testimony during the Salem witch trials—even and especially spectral evidence—was inflected through their embrace of empiricism. “Rather than a symbol of a fading occult worldview,” Rivett writes, “the devil in Salem represented a phase of an emerging Enlightenment modernity.” Against popular histories that caricature the Puritans as premodern, irrational religious fanatics, Rivett writes simply and convincingly: “Irrationality does not suffice as an adequate explanation of Salem.” 37

Still, something seemed to change at Salem—or rather, Salem seemed to demonstrate that something drastic had already shifted. The Salem witch trials have been presented in various ways as the end of Puritan New England. Perhaps Salem helped usher in a new age of religious skepticism, though belief in witchcraft persisted. More important, the relationship of state to church seemed to change. As Ray writes, “[N]ever again would the state ask the church for advice.” 38 But Salem seemed to happen in part because the magistrates disregarded the ministers’ advice, while at the same time still feeling compelled to ask for it. The ministers, too, seemed to recognize their weakening authority in their ambiguous responses and their inability (at least in most cases) to confront the magistrates openly. 39 This deepening divide between magistrates and ministers suggests not only that the Salem witch crisis caused the breakdown of Puritan New England, but that it also resulted in part from the ministers’ loss of authority.

Histories of the Salem witch trials begin with the records of the trials, and those documents raise their own sorts of questions. Secondhand accounts from several witnesses survive, along with confessions, petitions, and many of the preparatory documents for trial (such as depositions, indictments, and examinations), but the records of the actual trials before the Court of Oyer and Terminer have gone missing. In addition, the record book of the Salem Village Church does not contain the crucial years. Beyond a catalogue of what exists or not, we also have to take into consideration who did the recording, an aspect of the records made newly available by the extraordinary 2009 edition Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt . We know now, for example, that Thomas Putnam Jr., recorded (or “authored”) a great many depositions and testimonials—more than 120, amounting to more than one-third of the total number. Thomas Putnam and his extended family (including his afflicted wife, daughter, and servant) would account for 160 accusations and the prosecution of fifty-eight people, one-third of the total number accused and arrested. Moreover, Putnam’s ability to write or record these documents proved the power of his pen: his depositions were unusually successful. 40

The question of who wrote what and how documents were stylized, as well as questions of language and genre, shape our understanding of the surviving records and accounts. For example, Thomas Putnam has been noted for his use of stock phrases. Ray points out that the phrase “most grievously” appears 172 times in his descriptions of the suffering of the afflicted, while the phrases “grievously tortured” and “grievously tormented” appear forty-five times. 41 Was the use of such phrases responsible for Putnam’s strong results, and what does that tell us about the power of narrative or the expectations of audience during the Salem witch trials? As scholars have also highlighted, Putnam particularly loved to involve the heart. The depositions he “recorded” would often have an afflicted person saying: “I verily believe in my heart that [so-and-so] is a witch.” 42 These details about Putnam’s writings open the door to larger examinations of language and its effects. What stock phrases worked, and what made them work? Who else was involved in writing records, and how did their styles differ? Literary analysis could yield fresh results about how to read the records of the Salem witch trials.

Those fresh readings would be bolstered by two related approaches: borderlands studies and performance studies. For many years now, literary scholars have asked how to read and understand the texts produced at the meeting of two cultures. In particular, a methodology inflected by the concept of the “borderlands” offers ways of reading against the grain, helping, for instance, to locate Native American actors and Native American voices in texts written almost exclusively by Europeans. In the case of the Salem records we have a similar situation: How do we understand the actions and the voices of the accused in records written almost exclusively by the prosecution? How do we read the Salem witch trial records against the grain? It has always been known that the prosecution wrote most of the records that survive, but only recently have we learned just how much they were composed by particular individuals, such as Thomas Putnam Jr. With that understanding, we can now ask in new ways how to read what he and others produced. Performance studies could also open Salem with its rich theoretical understanding of “performance” and identity. Many have likened the Salem court to a stage. In fact, the spectacle of Salem, which brought together the afflicted, the accused, and the public, not only went against advice and precedent—previously, judges were urged to separate all parties and keep the afflicted individuals apart—it also provided the evidence later used to convict the accused. The spectral torments witnessed and performed during examinations became the basis of conviction. Performance studies thus has much to teach us about how to read Salem.

Beyond the actual events at Salem and their surviving records, there is also the remembering and remaking of Salem that has occurred ever since. Each generation has written its own account of Salem, though that writing proliferated in the wake of expanding education requirements and the new schoolbooks written to meet demand beginning in the early 1800s. In attempts to give the new nation a history and a tradition, Salem was invoked as a moral lesson: it represented the dark parts of the colonial past that the new United States had left behind. Novels, plays, and poetry dwelt on the tragedy as well. The first literary treatment of the trials, according to Gretchen Adams, was the 1817 epic poem The Sorceress, or Salem Delivered by Jonathan Scott. But as Adams explains, “By midcentury many notable nineteenth-century literary figures, including New England natives John Neal, John William De Forest, John Greenleaf Whittier, and of course Nathaniel Hawthorne produced major novels using the witchcraft trials as significant plot elements.” 43

As Adams indicates, perhaps the most famous author to wrestle with Salem was Nathaniel Hawthorne, a descendant of Judge Hathorne who added the “w” to his name in order to distinguish himself from his ancestor. Salem lies at the heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables as well as several short stories, especially “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “Young Goodman Brown.” In the short stories, Hawthorne dwells on the problem of spectral evidence. According to Michael Colacurcio, the link between the two tales told at Salem Gallows Hill in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” is that “both concern the Puritan problem of ‘specter evidence,’” in each case pointing readers to perceive “the truth of specter evidence as guilty projection”: that is, “in both cases the charges of diabolical evil probably reveals more about the accuser than the accused,” and such tendencies continue beyond a superstitious past. 44 The same concern with spectral evidence frames “Young Goodman Brown,” but here the question has changed to take up an issue from the trials themselves: if the devil can take any shape, and if those shapes were being used to identify the accused, then could the devil be trusted? In other words, and more deeply, how could one gain adequate knowledge of the invisible world and the true constitution of one’s neighbors and fellow church members? As Colacurcio aptly summarizes, the problem identified in “Young Goodman Brown” is that “the difficulty of detecting a witch is distressingly similar to the radically Puritan problem of discovering a saint.” And if one cannot adequately or accurately do either, then the Puritan experiment itself will fail. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne essentially claims that Salem revealed the fundamental flaw in Puritanism: the inability to discover the invisible through the visible, to judge the status of another’s soul through visible practice or deed. As Colacurcio puts it, “Ultimately, evidence fails.” 45

Meanwhile, some 19th-century literary treatments of Salem turned to the tragedy for a homegrown American sensationalism, lending Gothic features to American fiction. This was certainly the case with John Neal’s novel Rachel Dyer ( 1828 ) and, in more nuanced ways, it continued with Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables . Lawrence Buell analyzes such works as what he calls “provincial Gothic,” meaning “the use of Gothic conventions to anatomize the pathology of regional culture.” 46 In his account of this Gothic trend and its appeal, Buell gives one of the best summaries of how and why Salem made its way into the literary imagination of the nation and the nation’s writers in the 19th century. He writes, “We owe the fact that the Salem delusion is the best-known episode of early New England history next to the voyage of the Mayflower largely to Hawthorne and fellow gothicizers of his era, to whom witchcraft appealed … for a mixture of reasons: as an opportunity for proxy war against religious conservatives, as that instance from the regional past that resonated most strongly with the supernaturalism of traditional Gothic, and as a proof that New England culture was not so humdrum as early national critics had feared.” 47 But the appeal of Salem was not limited to the provincial Gothic; it also provides the plot and setting of several works by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As Chadwick Hansen showed long ago, Longfellow’s play Giles Cory of Salem Farms , written in the wake of the Civil War, was the first account to transform Tituba into a half-black slave. 48 After Longfellow, others metamorphosed Tituba fully into an African American and finally into an African who was kidnapped as a child, even though nothing in the existing records lends support to such a claim and most scholars reject it. Tituba is one of many characters who has received her own rewritings through the years, including in the more recent and well-received novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem ( 1986 ) by Maryse Condé, which won the French Grand Prix award for women’s literature and was translated into English in 1992 .

As Condé’s novel reveals, the cultural memory and literary imagination of Salem lives on. During the Cold War, for example, Arthur Miller famously turned to Salem for a model that would lay bare the persecutions of supposed communists and subversives led by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Here again, the primary problem was one of evidence: What counts as a clear indication of either patriotism or subversion, a good soul or a soul bent against the common good? The evidence would prove “spectral” in its own way, and Miller found Salem to be a good site for showing why. As The Crucible continues being regularly performed, joined by ever fresher retellings and reimaginings, the cultural memory and function of Salem seems rich for even further exploration. While individual readings of particular literary usages abound (especially for Hawthorne), no specifically literary history of Salem exists—no study of its changing shape and operation in plays, poems, and fiction from 1817 to the present day. What does Salem do for us, and why do certain accounts of Salem predominate over others? Popular understandings of the event often emphasize the girls’ fortune-telling practices, Tituba’s “voodoo” spells, and ergot poisoning—all theories invented after the Civil War and all rejected by most scholars. Yet the tales live on. What do such stories do for the cultural memory of Salem that more accurate, scholarly accounts fail to accomplish? More generally, why do Americans keep remembering, reliving, and remaking Salem? What need does it meet?

However Salem is approached or remembered, it is clear that scholars and the general public will keep grappling with what happened there in 1692 . The Salem witch trials have formed one of the cornerstone cultural memories of American history, a turning point from Puritan New England to a province more aligned with British imperial interests. How much actually changed as a result of the trials is open to question, and scholars have offered a wide variety of answers. Some have even tried to link the trials to the eventual coming of the American Revolution, though such approaches seem rather shaky at best. Nonetheless, all agree that something changed, or that the tragedy came about because of deep shifts in the culture and control of Puritan New England. The significance of Salem lies in the meaning and perception of that change, along with all the possible explanations for why and how it occurred. Yet for all the answers proposed, the enduring legacy of the witch trials arises primarily from the persistent aura of mystery that surround them—this tragic event erupting against precedent and probability, supported and opposed by people at every level of society and in every station of life, spun out of control by eager magistrates and frightened girls, resulting in a massive injustice that New England would reckon with for many years, and that Americans would be haunted by ever since.

Select Primary Sources

Calef, Robert . More Wonders of the Invisible World . Salem, 1700. Reprint, Breinigsville, PA: Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2011.
Hall, David D. Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638–1693 . 2d ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.
Mather, Cotton . Wonders of the Invisible World (London, 1693). Reprint, Lincoln, NB: Zea Books, 2011.
Mather, Increase . Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (Boston, 1693) .
Rosenthal, Bernard , ed. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project .

Select Literary Sources

Condé, Maryse . I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem . Translated by Richard Philcox . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
de Forest, John William . Witching Times . New York: Putnam’s Magazine, 1856.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . The House of the Seven Gables . Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1851.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835). Reprint in Complete Short Stories (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1959), and other collections.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel . “Young Goodman Brown” (1846). Reprint in Complete Short Stories (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1959), and other collections.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth . “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms.” In The New England Tragedies , by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
Miller, Arthur . The Crucible . New York: Viking, 1951.

Essays on Salem Witch Trials

Salem witch trials essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the salem witch trials: an examination of mass hysteria and its consequences.

Thesis Statement: The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were a tragic chapter in American history characterized by mass hysteria, social dynamics, and the persecution of innocent individuals, and this essay explores the factors that led to the witch trials and their enduring legacy.

Introduction
The Historical Context of Puritan New England
The Outbreak of Accusations and the Role of Fear
The Trials and Executions
Analysis of Social and Psychological Factors
The Legacy of the Salem Witch Trials

Essay Title 2: The Accused and the Accusers: Uncovering Motivations and Identities in the Salem Witch Trials

Thesis Statement: A closer examination of the accused witches and their accusers in the Salem Witch Trials reveals a complex interplay of personal grievances, social dynamics, and religious fervor that contributed to the tragedy.

The Accused: Their Backgrounds and Vulnerabilities
The Accusers: Motivations and Social Positions
The Legal Proceedings and the Role of Spectral Evidence
Repercussions on the Accused and the Accusers

Essay Title 3: Lessons from Salem: Examining the Salem Witch Trials in Historical Context

Thesis Statement: The Salem Witch Trials serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked power, religious extremism, and the need for a fair and just legal system, and this essay explores the enduring relevance of the trials in contemporary society.

Comparing the Salem Witch Trials to Other Historical Witch Hunts
Exploring the Role of Religion and Superstition
Lessons for Modern Justice Systems and Civil Liberties
Preserving the Memory and Lessons of the Salem Witch Trials

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Mass Hysteria in The Crucible

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Causes and Effects of The Salem Witch Trials

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How Cotton Mather’s Influence Caused The Salem Witch Trial Hysteria of 1692

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May 1692 - October 1692

United States

The Salem witchcraft trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions that took place in colonial Massachusetts, specifically in the town of Salem, between 1692 and 1693. These trials were a dark chapter in American history, characterized by the mass hysteria and persecution of individuals accused of practicing witchcraft. The trials were sparked by the strange and unexplained behavior of several young girls, who claimed to be afflicted by witches. This led to a frenzy of accusations and trials, where numerous people, primarily women, were accused of consorting with the Devil and practicing witchcraft. During the trials, the accused individuals faced unfair and biased proceedings, often based on hearsay, spectral evidence, and superstitions. Many innocent people were wrongly convicted and subjected to harsh punishments, including imprisonment and even execution.

The Salem witch trials occurred in the late 17th century in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was a Puritan society deeply rooted in religious beliefs and strict social hierarchies. The trials took place against the backdrop of a tense and uncertain period, marked by political, social, and religious upheaval. In the years leading up to the trials, the colony faced challenges such as territorial disputes, conflicts with Native American tribes, and economic instability. Additionally, the Puritan community was grappling with the concept of witchcraft, influenced by prevailing beliefs in Europe at the time. The prevailing religious ideology, which emphasized a strict interpretation of Christianity, fostered a climate of fear and suspicion. The Puritans believed that witchcraft was a serious offense and that the Devil could infiltrate their community. This mindset, combined with existing social tensions and personal rivalries, created fertile ground for the accusations and subsequent trials.

Reverend Samuel Parris: Parris was the minister of Salem Village and the father of one of the afflicted girls. His sermons and strict religious teachings contributed to the atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Tituba: Tituba was a slave belonging to Reverend Parris. She was the first person accused of witchcraft and her supposed confessions fueled the hysteria surrounding the trials. Cotton Mather: Mather was a prominent Puritan minister and writer who played a role in shaping public opinion during the trials. Although initially supportive, he later expressed doubts about the fairness of the proceedings. Judge William Stoughton: Stoughton was the chief justice of the special court established to hear the witchcraft cases. He was known for his strong belief in witchcraft and his harsh and biased approach to the trials. Rebecca Nurse: Nurse was an elderly woman known for her piety and respected standing in the community. Despite her innocence, she was accused and ultimately executed as a witch.

The Salem witch trials, although a localized event in colonial America, have had a lasting influence on history. Here are some ways in which they have made an impact: Legal Reforms: The trials revealed the dangers of unchecked religious fervor and the flaws of the legal system at the time. This prompted reforms in evidence standards and legal procedures, ensuring fairer trials in the future. Religious Freedom: The trials highlighted the dangers of religious intolerance and the need for the separation of church and state. They contributed to the growing idea of religious freedom and the recognition of individual rights. Public Consciousness: The Salem witch trials serve as a cautionary tale about the consequences of mass hysteria, false accusations, and the power of fear. They continue to raise awareness about the dangers of scapegoating and the importance of critical thinking. Cultural Impact: The trials have become an enduring symbol of injustice and persecution. They have inspired numerous works of literature, art, and media, ensuring their place in popular culture and keeping the memory alive.

"The Crucible" by Arthur Miller: This renowned play, first performed in 1953, uses the trials as an allegory for McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the United States during the 1950s. It depicts the hysteria, false accusations, and the devastating consequences of mass paranoia. "The Witch" (2015): This horror film, set in the 17th century, portrays a family dealing with supernatural forces and suspicion of witchcraft. While not a direct adaptation of the Salem witch trials, it captures the atmosphere and fear prevalent during that time. "Salem" (2014-2017): This television series explores the trials within a supernatural context, depicting witches, magic, and historical figures. It weaves a fictional narrative with elements inspired by the events of the Salem witch trials. "I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem" by Maryse Condé: This novel offers a fictionalized account from the perspective of Tituba, an enslaved woman accused of witchcraft during the trials. It examines the intersection of race, gender, and power dynamics in the context of the trials.

1. The trials resulted in the execution of 20 people, 14 of whom were women, and the imprisonment of many others. 2. The initial accusations began when young girls in Salem Village claimed to be afflicted by witchcraft. 3. The first person to be accused and executed was Bridget Bishop on June 10, 1692. 4. The trials were fueled by religious and social tensions, as well as economic disputes within the community. 5. The court relied heavily on spectral evidence, which was testimony of the accused appearing in the form of a specter or ghost. 6. The infamous Salem witch trials ended abruptly when Governor William Phips ordered the trials to stop in October 1692. 7. The aftermath of the trials led to a sense of shame and guilt within the community, with efforts made to compensate the families of the victims.

The topic of the Salem witch trials is important to write an essay about due to its profound historical significance and the valuable lessons it teaches us about human behavior, justice, and the dangers of mass hysteria. The trials serve as a cautionary tale, reminding us of the devastating consequences that can arise when fear, prejudice, and the suspension of rational judgment take hold. By examining the Salem witch trials, we gain insight into the complex social, religious, and political dynamics of colonial America. We explore the role of religion in shaping beliefs and attitudes, the power dynamics within communities, and the impact of external influences on society. Furthermore, the trials raise important questions about justice and the legal system. They highlight the importance of due process, the presumption of innocence, and the dangers of relying on unreliable evidence. The events of Salem also shed light on the long-lasting psychological, emotional, and social effects on both the accused and the accusers.

1. Baker, E. A. (2007). The devil of great island: Witchcraft and conflict in early New England. Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Boyer, P., & Nissenbaum, S. (1974). Salem possessed: The social origins of witchcraft. Harvard University Press. 3. Carlson, L. (2010). A fever in Salem: A new interpretation of the New England witch trials. Ivan R. Dee. 4. Demos, J. (1982). Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the culture of early New England. Oxford University Press. 5. Hoffer, P. C. (1997). The Salem witchcraft trials: A legal history. University Press of Kansas. 6. Karlsen, C. F. (1989). The devil in the shape of a woman: Witchcraft in colonial New England. W.W. Norton & Company. 7. Norton, M. B. (2003). In the devil's snare: The Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692. Vintage. 8. Reis, E. (1997). Damned women: Sinners and witches in Puritan New England. Cornell University Press. 9. Rosenthal, B. (2009). Salem story: Reading the witch trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press. 10. Upham, C. W. (1980). Salem witchcraft: With an account of Salem Village and a history of opinions on witchcraft and kindred subjects. Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

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Witch hunts

Setting the scene, fits and contortions, three witches.

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Bill of Rights Institute - The Salem Witch Trials
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Ancient Origins - Salem Witch Trial hysteria and the courageous stance of Giles Corey
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Table Of Contents

In the late 1600s the Salem Village community in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Danvers, Massachusetts) was fairly small and undergoing a period of turmoil with little political guidance. There was a social divide between the leading families as well as a split between factions that were for and against the village’s new pastor, Samuel Parris. After some young girls of the village (two of them relatives of Parris) started demonstrating strange behaviours and fits, they were urged to identify the person who had bewitched them. Their initial accusations gave way to trials, hysteria, and a frenzy that resulted in further accusations, often between the differing factions.

How many people were killed during the Salem witch trials?

By the end of the Salem witch trials, 19 people had been hanged and 5 others had died in custody. Additionally, a man was pressed beneath heavy stones until he died.

After weeks of informal hearings, Sir William Phips, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony , interceded to add some formality to the proceedings. Over the following year many trials were held and many people imprisoned. As the trials continued, accusations extended beyond Salem Village to surrounding communities. After Governor Phips’s wife was accused, he again interceded and ordered that a new court be established that would not allow so-called spectral evidence. By May 1693 everyone in custody under conviction or suspicion of witchcraft had been pardoned by Phips.

The haphazard fashion in which the Salem witch trials were conducted contributed to changes in U.S. court procedures, including rights to legal representation and cross-examination of accusers as well as the presumption that one is innocent until proven guilty. The Salem trials also went on to become a powerful metaphor for the anticommunist hearings led by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s, famously in the form of Arthur Miller ’s allegorical play The Crucible (1953).

Salem witch trials , (June 1692–May 1693), in American history, a series of investigations and persecutions that caused 19 convicted “witches” to be hanged and many other suspects to be imprisoned in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Danvers , Massachusetts).

The events in Salem in 1692 were but one chapter in a long story of witch hunts that began in Europe between 1300 and 1330 and ended in the late 18th century (with the last known execution for witchcraft taking place in Switzerland in 1782). The Salem trials occurred late in the sequence, after the abatement of the European witch-hunt fervour, which peaked from the 1580s and ’90s to the 1630s and ’40s. Some three-fourths of those European witch hunts took place in western Germany , the Low Countries , France , northern Italy , and Switzerland. The number of trials and executions varied according to time and place, but it is generally believed that some 110,000 persons in total were tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 to 60,000 were executed.

The “hunts” were efforts to identify witches rather than pursuits of individuals who were already thought to be witches. Witches were considered to be followers of Satan who had traded their souls for his assistance. It was believed that they employed demons to accomplish magical deeds, that they changed from human to animal form or from one human form to another, that animals acted as their “familiar spirits,” and that they rode through the air at night to secret meetings and orgies. There is little doubt that some individuals did worship the devil and attempt to practice sorcery with harmful intent. However, no one ever embodied the concept of a “witch” as previously described.

The process of identifying witches began with suspicions or rumours. Accusations followed, often escalating to convictions and executions. The Salem witch trials and executions came about as the result of a combination of church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all of which unfolded in a vacuum of political authority.

Salem Witch Trials. A women protests as one of her accusers, a young girl, appears to have convulsions. A small group of women were the source of accusations, testimony, and dramatic demonstrations.

There were two Salems in the late 17th century: a bustling commerce-oriented port community on Massachusetts Bay known as Salem Town, which would evolve into modern Salem , and, roughly 10 miles (16 km) inland from it, a smaller, poorer farming community of some 500 persons known as Salem Village. The village itself had a noticeable social divide that was exacerbated by a rivalry between its two leading families—the well-heeled Porters, who had strong connections with Salem Town’s wealthy merchants, and the Putnams , who sought greater autonomy for the village and were the standard-bearers for the less-prosperous farm families. Squabbles over property were commonplace, and litigiousness was rampant.

In 1689, through the influence of the Putnams, Samuel Parris , a merchant from Boston by way of Barbados , became the pastor of the village’s Congregational church. Parris, whose largely theological studies at Harvard College (now Harvard University ) had been interrupted before he could graduate, was in the process of changing careers from business to the ministry. He brought to Salem Village his wife, their three children, a niece, and two slaves who were originally from Barbados—John Indian, a man, and Tituba , a woman. (There is uncertainty regarding the relationship between the slaves and their ethnic origins. Some scholars believe that they were of African heritage, while others think that they may have been of Caribbean Native American heritage.)

Parris had shrewdly negotiated his contract with the congregation, but relatively early in his tenure he sought greater compensation, including ownership of the parsonage, which did not sit well with many members of the congregation. Parris’s orthodox Puritan theology and preaching also divided the congregation, a split that became demonstrably visible when he routinely insisted that nonmembers of the congregation leave before communion was celebrated. In the process Salem divided into pro- and anti-Parris factions.

Probably stimulated by voodoo tales told to them by Tituba , Parris’s daughter Betty (age 9), his niece Abigail Williams (age 11), and their friend Ann Putnam, Jr. (about age 12), began indulging in fortune-telling. In January 1692 Betty’s and Abigail’s increasingly strange behaviour (described by at least one historian as juvenile deliquency) came to include fits. They screamed, made odd sounds, threw things, contorted their bodies, and complained of biting and pinching sensations.

Looking back with the perspective provided by modern science, some scholars have speculated that the strange behaviour may have resulted from some combination of asthma , encephalitis , Lyme disease , epilepsy , child abuse , delusional psychosis, or convulsive ergotism—the last a disease caused by eating bread or cereal made of rye that has been infected with the fungus ergot , which can elicit vomiting, choking, fits, hallucinations, and the sense of something crawling on one’s skin. (The hallucinogen LSD is a derivative of ergot.) Given the subsequent spread of the strange behaviour to other girls and young women in the community and the timing of its display, however, those physiological and psychological explanations are not very convincing. The litany of odd behaviour also mirrored that of the children of a Boston family who in 1688 were believed to have been bewitched, a description of which had been provided by Congregational minister Cotton Mather in his book Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689) and which may have been known by the girls in Salem Village. In February, unable to account for their behaviour medically, the local doctor, William Griggs, put the blame on the supernatural. At the suggestion of a neighbour, a “witch cake” (made with the urine of the victims) was baked by Tituba to try to ferret out the supernatural perpetrator of the girls’ illness. Although it provided no answers, its baking outraged Parris, who saw it as a blasphemous act.

Pressured by Parris to identify their tormentor, Betty and Abigail claimed to have been bewitched by Tituba and two other marginalized members of the community, neither of whom attended church regularly: Sarah Good , an irascible beggar, and Sarah Osborn (also spelled Osborne), an elderly bed-ridden woman who was scorned for her romantic involvement with an indentured servant . On March 1 two magistrates from Salem Town, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, went to the village to conduct a public inquiry. Both Good and Osborn protested their own innocence, though Good accused Osborn. Initially, Tituba also claimed to be blameless, but after being repeatedly badgered (and undoubtedly fearful owing to her vulnerable status as a slave), she told the magistrates what they apparently wanted to hear—that she had been visited by the devil and made a deal with him. In three days of vivid testimony, she described encounters with Satan’s animal familiars and with a tall, dark man from Boston who had called upon her to sign the devil’s book, in which she saw the names of Good and Osborn along with those of seven others that she could not read.

The magistrates then had not only a confession but also what they accepted as evidence of the presence of more witches in the community, and hysteria mounted. Other girls and young women began experiencing fits, among them Ann Putnam, Jr. ; her mother; her cousin, Mary Walcott; and the Putnams’s servant, Mercy Lewis. Significantly, those that they began identifying as other witches were no longer just outsiders and outcasts but rather upstanding members of the community, beginning with Rebecca Nurse , a mature woman of some prominence. As the weeks passed, many of the accused proved to be enemies of the Putnams , and Putnam family members and in-laws would end up being the accusers in dozens of cases.

86 Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics You Can Use

Oct 30, 2022

Oct 30, 2022 | Topics

The Salem Witch Trials have been a source of inspiration for writers and other artists for centuries. The trial was a dark time in American history, but it’s also one of the fascinating stories ever told. Many have used this event as the basis for their works, including Arthur Miller (The Crucible), Stephen Speilberg (The Witches), and John Proctor, who wrote a book called More Wonders of the Invisible World.

The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft and 20 were executed. If you’re interested in writing a research paper about the Salem witch trials, you may want to consider the following Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics and ideas to get you started

Best Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics

How did the Salem Witch Trials begin?
Who were the main characters in the trials?
What was life like for everyone involved during the trials?
The Salem Witch Trials and the Puritan mindset
The impact of the Salem Witch Trials on literature
The social and political repercussions of the Salem Witch Trials, including their effect on women’s rights
What role did religion play in the Salem Witch Trials?
Were there any consequences for those who believed and were practicing witchcraft?
How does Arthur Miller’s The Crucible compare to actual events during the witch trials?
The role of religion in the Salem Witch Trials
The effects of gender on the trials
The hysteria surrounding the witch trials in Salem Village, Massachusetts and other towns nearby
How the courtroom proceedings worked during these trials
Why were people accused of the witch during this time period
The role of the accused in their trials
The role of the court officials and judges during these trials
How events surrounding the Salem Witch Trials shaped American culture for years to come

Interesting Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics

The role of gender in the Salem Witch Trials
The importance of literacy and education during this period
The use of torture during these trials
How people were accused of the witch during this period
The hysteria surrounding the witch trials in Salem Village and other towns nearby
Why were people accused of the witch during this period?
How did the Salem Witch Trials compare with other witch hunts?
What made people in Salem believe that there were witches in their midst?
Did the Salem Witch Trials have an impact on future history?
What happened to those who were jailed during this period?
Who was involved, and how did they change after their experience?
What do we know about the witches in Salem accused of being responsible for evil?
Were there any legitimate reasons for the witch trials?
Did people believe witches could hurt them or was it just a way to control others?

Simple Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics

What were the Salem Witch Trials?
What was the cause of the witch trials, and why did they happen in Salem?
What did people believe about witches at the time?
How did this event affect American history and culture?
Puritanism and Witches: How they influenced the events in Salem
The role of Cotton Mather in influencing the Puritan community and its views on witches
How did people react to witch trials? Were they scared or not? What were their reactions towards it?
How did these trials affect women’s rights throughout history?
The role of women in the witch trials
How did these trials affect the community as a whole?
Did any of the accused witches confess to being one or not?

Controversial Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics

How did people react to witch trials?
How did the Puritans react to the witch trials?
The role of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials
What were the consequences for those accused of being witches?
Were these trials fair to women?
The idea that the Salem Witch Trials were a government conspiracy
The fact that all the accused were women and girls
The fact that many of the accused never confessed to being witches, despite being tortured
The fact that many were hanged and one person was pressed to death in this historically significant event
Many accused were hanged, and one person was pressed to death in this historically significant event.
The fact is that many of the accused never confessed to being witches, despite being tortured.

Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics for Middle School

What Did You Learn About the Salem Witch Trials?
How Did You Feel About This Event?
Were You Surprised By Any of the Results?
Did Any of Your Students Have a Connection to These People/Events?
How Do You Feel About the Witchcraft Trials?
Why Do You Think Witchcraft Trials Happened, and How Do You Feel About Those Who Were Charged With Witchcraft?
Do You Think There Were People Present During the Witchcraft Trials Who Believed in Witchcraft and Were Guilty of Doing So?
Why Did the Trials Happen and How Would They Be Different if They Happened Today?
The Role of The Puritan Views and Values in Colonial Massachusetts

Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics for High School

What was the social climate like in Salem, a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony at that time?
Why were people tried in court rather than by a local magistrate?
How did the accused feel about being put on trial?
What kinds of evidence were used? Was evidence of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials?
How did the court decide whether or not someone was guilty of witchcraft?
What were some of the most common reasons for accusing others of witchcraft?
How did people feel about being accused of witchcraft?
‘Young Goodman Brown,’ by Hawthorne. How can the writer use the story’s setting to represent the Puritan community’s attitude during one of the most tragic events in early American history?
Witchcraft among women and men in France during the 16th and 17th centuries
Compare the most common modern-day witch hunts, such as the communist hunts and the 1950s events that fueled the discovery of the crucible by Arthur Miller, to trials and executions of people accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics for College

How the Salem Witch Trials affected how we view witches and witchcraft.
The impact of Puritanism on the Salem Witch Trials.
How the hysteria spread like wildfire through a community.
Why were women targeted for witchcraft accusations, in particular during this period?
How the trials were a form of social control.
The role of gender in the witch trials.
Examining how Puritanism affected women and their roles within society.
Why was hysteria so effective in Salem during this period?
Was Abigail Williams, niece to reverend Samuel Parris, Solely Responsible for the Salem Witch Trials?
The role of religion and how it affected the trials.
How social class played into the witch trials (such as with Tituba, Good and Hobbs).

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Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics

The 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials is a dreadful piece of writing that has great significance in modern society. The Salem witch trials have triggered varied emotions in the subject of religion, feuds, and politics. The Salem witch trials have some of the most dreadful events that have negative and positive effects on society.

The people accused as witches in the Salem witch trials had to carry the cross of many other crimes they hadn’t committed. The witches were accused of not attending church, supporting other accused persons, being lone wolves, and even assisting Wabanaki Indians. Also, being found talking to yourself could have as well landed you in a trial as a witch. When writing an essay on witch trials, you can discuss anything to do with the reasons people were accused of being witches in Salem.

Your essay can also discuss the modern-day witch hunts in reference to what people learned during the Salem witch trials. The most common modern witch hunts include communist hunts and the 1950s events that fueled the discovery of the crucible by Arthur Miller. We at TopicsBase are here to make the essay writing process fun and a breeze. With our outstanding Salem witch trials research paper topics, you can always write an impressive essay that meets the professor’s requirements.

The relationship between religion and witchcraft
How the Salem witch trials affected how we view witches today?
The adverse effects of the Salem witch trials on the society
The primary triggers of the Salem witch trials
How the Puritan values and views during colonial Massachusetts lead to Salem witch trials
How Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Cloyce were arrested during the Salem witch trials?
Economic factors that lead to the Salem witch trials
Well-known women witches in the 15 th and 16 th centuries in German
The impact of witchcraft among French women and men during the 16 th and 17 th centuries
The leading roles played by night witches in the Second World War
The witch trials of Italy in the 17 th century
The importance of gender roles in the Salem witch trials
The role religion played in unfair Salem witch trials
The social causes of the Salem witch trials and the impact they had on innocent souls
American literature and Salem witch trials: The relationship and differences
The less-known methods used by the accused during Salem witch trials to avoid unfair trial and execution
The Salem witch trials led to the modern-day gay marriages
What were the leading reasons people were accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials
The leading events that triggered the Salem witch trials
Historically-documented and verified evidence linked to the Salem witch trials
The role politics and socialism played in the Salem witch trials
The Salem witch trials were unfair and prejudice
The Salem witch trials led to the death of innocent souls
The Salem witch trials were malicious and inhuman
Not all the accused during the Salem witch trials were guilty
The documented accounts of the Salem witch trials

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The Salem Witch Trials: a Dark Chapter in American History

This essay about the Salem Witch Trials examines the historical context, key events, and lasting impact of this dark period in American history. It explores how the trials, occurring in Salem, Massachusetts, between 1692 and 1693, were fueled by a combination of political instability, economic hardship, and deep-seated religious beliefs. The initial accusations of witchcraft made by a group of young girls led to a wave of hysteria and unjust trials, marked by the use of spectral evidence and coerced confessions. The essay highlights the social and judicial breakdown that allowed for such a miscarriage of justice, ultimately ending with the intervention of Governor William Phips. The trials serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of mass hysteria and the importance of due process and rationality in legal proceedings.

How it works

The Salem Witch Trials, a terrible time that brought attention to the pitfalls of a theocratic society and the dangers of public hysteria, are still among the most notorious moments in American history. Twenty people, the most of whom were women, were executed and numerous others were imprisoned as a result of the trials, which took place in the Puritan colony of Salem, Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. Examining the sociopolitical backdrop, the events that set off the Salem Witch Trials, and the ensuing effects on American culture are necessary to comprehend the trials.

In the late 17th century, Salem was a community fraught with tensions. Political instability, economic hardship, and social fragmentation were prevalent. The Puritans, who dominated the region, were a deeply religious group with a strict moral code, believing that any deviation from their beliefs could invite the wrath of God. Their worldview was intensely supernatural; they believed that the Devil was constantly at work in the world, leading the faithful astray. This rigid and fearful mindset set the stage for the events that would unfold.

The spark that ignited the Salem Witch Trials was a group of young girls in Salem Village who began exhibiting strange behaviors in early 1692. These behaviors included convulsions, fits, and bizarre outbursts, which the local doctor, unable to find a physical cause, attributed to supernatural influences. Pressured by the community, the girls accused several local women of bewitching them. Among the first accused were Tituba, a Caribbean slave, Sarah Good, a beggar, and Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman. These accusations, grounded in personal vendettas and deep-seated prejudices, were quickly taken up by the local authorities.

The ensuing trials were marked by a lack of concrete evidence, relying heavily on spectral evidence—testimony that the spirit or specter of the accused was seen committing witchcraft. This type of evidence was inherently dubious, yet it was enough to convict many individuals. The court allowed this evidence, driven by the panic and fear gripping the community. Moreover, the accused were subjected to intense and often brutal interrogation methods, leading to false confessions. The social dynamics of Salem, with its rigid class structures and existing feuds, further fueled the frenzy.

By the summer of 1692, the witch hunt had expanded, and more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft. The trials took a devastating toll on the community, with families torn apart and reputations destroyed. The case of Rebecca Nurse, a respected elderly woman, exemplifies the irrationality of the trials. Despite widespread belief in her innocence, she was convicted and executed, underscoring the pervasive fear that had gripped Salem. The judicial proceedings were marred by a clear absence of due process and rationality, reflecting the dangerous intersection of superstition and authority.

The Salem Witch Trials eventually came to an end when Governor William Phips intervened, influenced by growing skepticism about the validity of the trials and the methods used. He dissolved the special court and prohibited further arrests on witchcraft charges. The use of spectral evidence was declared inadmissible, and many of the convicted were later exonerated. However, the damage had been done, and the trials left a lasting scar on the community and the American psyche.

Reflecting on the Salem Witch Trials reveals critical insights into the dangers of mass hysteria and the breakdown of legal and moral standards. It illustrates how fear and ignorance can lead to gross miscarriages of justice. The trials have since been examined as a cautionary tale, emphasizing the importance of due process and the separation of church and state. They also serve as a reminder of the perils of scapegoating and the need for vigilance against the encroachment of irrational beliefs into the judicial system.

In conclusion, the Salem Witch Trials stand as a stark reminder of the human capacity for error under pressure and fear. This dark chapter in American history underscores the importance of safeguarding against the forces of hysteria and maintaining the principles of justice and rationality. By understanding the context and consequences of these events, we can better appreciate the fragility of social order and the need to uphold integrity and fairness in all aspects of society.

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Lesson Plans
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Understanding the Salem Witch Trials

Engraving of a witchcraft trial at Salem Village. The central figure in this 1876 illustration of the courtroom is usually identified as Mary Walcott.

Wikimedia Commons

Salem, Massachusetts in 1691 was the home of a Puritan community with a strict moral code. In addition to the difficulties of farming in a harsh climate with rough terrain, Salem faced economic and political unrest. In this community, a group of girls accused an Indian slave named Tituba of witchcraft. Tituba confessed under pressure from court officials, and her confession ignited a hunt for witches that left 19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to death, and over 150 more people in prison awaiting a trial. In this lesson, students will explore the characteristics of the Puritan community in Salem, learn about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and try to understand how and why this event occurred.

Guiding Questions

What was life like in Puritan New England?

What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?

To what extent do the historic records show that the accused were innocent until proven guilty?

Learning Objectives

Describe cultural practices of the majority in Puritan New England.

Create a timeline of the events of the Salem Witch Trials.

Analyze multiple interpretations of the Salem Witch Trials.

Construct a position on whether the trials were justified.

Lesson Plan Details

Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s faced a number of serious challenges to a peaceful social fabric. Salem was divided into a prosperous town and a farming village. The villagers, in turn, were split into factions that fiercely debated whether to seek ecclesiastical and political independence from the town. In 1689 the villagers won the right to establish their own church and chose the Reverend Samuel Parris, a former merchant, as their minister. His rigid ways and seemingly boundless demands for compensation increased the already present friction. Many villagers vowed to drive Parris out, and they stopped contributing to his salary in October 1691.

These local concerns only compounded the severe social stresses that had already been affecting New England for two decades. A 1675 conflict with the Indians known as King Philip's War had resulted in more deaths relative to the size of the population than any other war in American history. A decade later, in 1685, King James II's government revoked the Massachusetts charter. A new royally-appointed governor, Sir Edmund Andros, sought to unite New England, New York, and New Jersey into a single Dominion of New England. He tried to abolish elected colonial assemblies, restrict town meetings, and impose direct control over militia appointments, and permitted the first public celebration of Christmas in Massachusetts, a celebration of which Puritans strongly disapproved. After William III replaced James II as King of England in 1689, Andros's government was overthrown, but Massachusetts was required to eliminate religious qualifications for voting and to extend religious toleration to sects such as the Quakers. The late seventeenth century also saw a increase in the number of black slaves in New England, which further unsettled the existing social order.

In February 1692, Betty Parris, Reverend Parris's daughter, as well as her friends Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam, became ill with symptoms that doctors could not diagnose, including fits and delirium. Dr. Griggs, who attended to the "afflicted" girls, suggested that they might be bewitched. Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and Mary Warren later claimed affliction as well.

Prodded by Parris and others, the girls named their tormentors: Sarah Good, a poor woman; Sarah Osbourn, an elderly woman; and Tituba, a slave who had told them stories involving Vudou beliefs. The women were tried for witchcraft - Good and Osbourn claimed innocence, and Tituba confessed. Tituba's detailed confession included a claim that there were several undiscovered witches who wanted to destroy the community. This caused a witch-hunting rampage: 19 men and women were hanged, one man was pressed to death, and over 150 more people were imprisoned, awaiting trial.

On September 22, 1692, the last eight alleged witches were hanged. On October 8, 1692, Governor Phipps ordered that spectral evidence (when someone claimed to witness a person's spirit in a separate location from that same person's physical body) could no longer be admitted in witchcraft trials. On October 29, 1692 Phipps prohibited further arrests and released many accused witches. The remaining alleged witches were pardoned by May 1693. The hangings of witches in 1692 were the last such hangings in America.

For more information, see the following EDSITEment-reviewed websites:

Digital History: The Salem Witch Scare
Tituba Biography

NCSS. D1.1.6-8. Explain how a question represents key ideas in the field.

NCSS.D2.His.1.6-8. Analyze connections among events and developments in broader historical contexts.

NCSS.D2.His.2.6-8. Classify series of historical events and developments as examples of change and/or continuity.

NCSS.D2.His.3.6-8. Use questions generated about individuals and groups to analyze why they, and the developments they shaped, are seen as historically significant.

NCSS.D2.His.4.6-8. Analyze multiple factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras.

NCSS.D2.His.5.6-8. Explain how and why perspectives of people have changed over time.

Review the lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and other useful websites. Download and print out documents you will use and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing.
Students can access the primary source materials and some of the activity materials via the EDSITEment LaunchPad .
Familiarize yourself with the Salem Witch Trials. For an overview, consult Digital History . For more detailed information, consult Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive .
If you plan to have students create pictures, or if you want to use larger sized paper for your students' timelines, be sure to have those materials handy.
Though each reading activity provides questions for discussion for the readings, teachers may wish to spend a few minutes with students asking introductory questions to help distill what they have read.

Activity 1. Life in Puritan New England

Separate the class into four groups, and assign each group one section of the EDSITEment Study Activity under the label Understanding Puritan New England . Offer them the following instructions, and suggest that they distribute the reading evenly and return to discuss the questions after 10–15 minutes of reading. Instructors might also consider assigning this reading the night before as homework.

Instructions for students: Just as the society around us shapes the way we think and act, so did it shape the people of Salem, Massachusetts in the 1600s. Look at the websites listed below, and, on a separate sheet of paper, answer the questions about life in Puritan New England. Note that many of the websites contain interactive images. Click on the images to open them, and mouse-over the image to discover more about it.

The Puritans

The Puritan Idea of the Covenant

New Groups: A Great Migration
Working: "To 1 day work at my house"
Beliefs: A City upon a Hill
What values that we now consider 'American' were contributed by the Puritans?
In the 1920s, how did people remember the Puritans? Define the word 'caricature' and explain how it relates to the Puritans.
To what extent did Puritans condemn alcohol consumption, artistic beauty, and poetry?
What did the Puritans believe was the primary purpose of government?
What did the Puritans think about the separation of church and state?
What is a 'separatist'? Were the Puritans 'separatists'? If not, describe their philosophy regarding the Church of England.
What is a 'covenant'? Explain the function of 'covenants' in the way the Puritans saw the world.
Did Puritans believe in tightly knit communities and families, or did they value families that were dispersed?
Describe some reasons why Puritans came to America from Europe.
What were some of the strategies New England colonists used to deal with the labor shortage?
Describe some of the religious beliefs of the Puritans.
Gender Roles: Beliefs and Gender Roles
Education: Print and Protestantism
Customs: Possessions Reveal Social Standing
Getting Things: Importing Status
Child Life: Fleeting Mortality
Look up the word 'Patriarchal' in the dictionary. Define what it means, in your own words.
What were some of the responsibilities of men in the 1700s in Colonial New England? What were some of the responsibilities of women?
Explain how the story of Adam and Eve was used to perpetuate prevailing ideas about men and women.
Were schools important in New England? Did people know how to read?
Were there as many schools in other parts of America as there were in New England?
Did wealthy people tend to spend a lot of money? What are some of the things you think they would buy?
What does 'conspicuous consumption' mean?
Why did so many children die at young ages in colonial New England?

Group Three

The Land 1680–1720
Agriculture: Agriculture and Community
Public Space: The Meeting House
According to your reading, what did most Europeans think of the North American Landscape?
What were some early colonial industries?
What was the center of public and religious life in New England?
Describe the common field system.
What were some results of European fences, mills, grass, and livestock being brought to New England?
Explain how a mill worked.
What were the criteria that a committee would use to "seat" the meetinghouse?
Who was allowed to vote? What did they vote on?

Ask students to explore the EDSITEment-reviewed websites using the Study Activity and questions as guides. Once they have answered all of the questions, ask students to prepare a summary of what they learned to present to the class. Have everyone contribute to the overall discussion about Puritan values (the same question begins each list), and then have students present their information to the class. This should be no more than a few sentences highlighting the key concepts of the aspect of Puritan life that they researched.

Activity 2. What is a Puritan? Case Studies

Ask students to access the following websites and answer the questions listed below. This can be done individually or with partners, and can also be given as a homework assignment. Ask students to read slowly and carefully, looking up words they do not understand and writing them down in their notebook.

John Dane's Narrative

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6214

Read the first five paragraphs of John Dane's Narrative, until you reach the following passage: "Then said my mother, " go where you will, God he will find you out ." This word, the point of it, stuck in my breast; and afterwards God struck it home to its head."

What does John Dane's piece about morality tell you about Puritan life?
Define 'Providence' and explain John Dane's beliefs about Providence.
In the third paragraph of John Dane's narrative, he relates a story about his upbringing. In a paragraph, explain your reaction to his story. How is this different or similar to your own interactions with your parents?
Choose one paragraph in John Dane's narrative and summarize it in your own words.

Finally, write the following names on slips of paper, and have students draw them from a hat. A convenient PDF with all the names is available for you to print out.

Bridget Bishop; Rev. George Burroughs; Giles Cory; Mary Easty; Sarah Good; Rebecca Nurse; John Proctor; Ann Pudeator; Samuel Wardwell; Sarah Osbourne; William Stoughton; John Hathorne; Samuel Sewall; Francis Dane; Cotton Mather; Sarah Churchill; Elizabeth Hubbard; Mercy Lewis; Elizabeth Parris; Ann Putnam, Jr.; Mary Warren; Mary Wallcott; Abigail Williams; Tituba; Philip English; George Jacobs, Sr., Susannah Martin; Sir William Phips; Samuel Parris.

Ask students to do the following as a homework assignment:

Find your assigned person on the website ' Important Persons in the Salem Court Records ' and write five sentences about him or her answering some of these questions, or similar questions that you come up with on your own:

How old was the person?
What was the person's occupation?
What do we know about the person's family?
Why do people think this person was accused of witchcraft and/or accused others of witchcraft?
What is most remembered in about this person in current popular culture, if anything?
Was this person wealthy or poor?
Where did this person live?

Activity 3. The Salem Witch Trials

Introduce the trials by asking students:

What do you think of when you hear the word witch?

If time allows, have students read Words About the Word 'Witch' , available via the EDSITEment-reviewed Digital History website. Otherwise, you might use the website to guide your students' discussion of the term.

As a way to draw together the earlier work on Puritan beliefs and the more specific instance of the Salem Witch Trials, introduce to students the description of Witchcraft available at the EDSITEment-reviewed website History Matters. You might ask students questions like: Who was the head of a Puritan household? What was thought of women who stood out? What cues suggested signs of witchcraft? How do these cues fit within the Puritan worldview that you researched earlier?

At this point, students should begin to reconstruct the history of "What Happened in Salem?" They should begin with their individual person that they researched (see Activity 2). Make sure students follow their individual's role, no matter how small or large, as best they can throughout the process. In combination with this Chronology via the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive , have students separate into groups of four to create a timeline of the Salem Witch Trials. Events on the timeline should each have one sentence attached to them, to assure that students read information about the events, rather than just finding them on the Chronology. The students can illustrate their timelines if there is time for them to do so.

If some groups of students finish earlier than others, ask these students to access this petition for bail from accused witches . Ask students to click on the document and to try to read it. What was it like reading this kind of document? What was the document about? What were some of the reasons that the accused witches cite for why they should be allowed to leave the prison? You might consider recommending both the NARA Primary Document Analysis Worksheet (PDF) and How to Read Old Documents (from American Centuries) to help students figure out the petition.

As students are completing the timeline or reading the primary source document, post signs on your walls - on one side of the classroom, post the words "I agree" and on the other side, post the words "I don't agree". Read a series of controversial statements, listed below, and have students stand somewhere between the "I agree" and "I disagree". They don't have to agree or disagree, they can stand in the middle, or closer to one side than the other, wherever on the spectrum they fit. After each statement is read and students are standing in their spots based on levels of agreement, conduct a conversation from those places, so students can physically see where they are. Students may change physical positions if they change their minds based on discussion. If students move, they should be asked what convinced them to change their mind.

Feel free to add to or alter this list of statements:

There is nothing about the Puritan way of life that I wish was a part of my life.
The law is always right.
Nothing like the Salem Witch Trials happens nowadays.
People who are accused of crimes are usually bad people.
The 'afflicted' girls who made the witchcraft accusations were bad people.
You should never confess to something of which you are not guilty.
It was just a coincidence that most of the alleged witches were female.
There is a clear, easy explanation for why the Salem Witch Trials happened.
The trials happened because of the 'afflicted girls', and not because of other, larger social forces.
It is silly to believe in witches.

Some of these questions might be best asked of the historical people the students have been tracking since Activity 2. Have the students role-play their historical person, answering some of the questions as the student might think their historical person would respond. Make sure the students explain their rationale behind their decisions.

Activity 4. Causes of the "Hysteria"

Use the Salem Witch Trials as an opportunity to explore the concept of the multiplicity of explanations and causes there can be for one event. Ask students to brainstorm a list of reasons why they think the Salem Witch Trials might have happened, which you can then write on the board. Ask them to support their reasons based on evidence they've learned in their study of the event. Add some of these Causes for the Outbreak of Witchcraft Hysteria in Salem , available via the EDSITEment reviewed Digital History website, to their list. Discuss the possibility that there was more than one cause of this event. Ask students to identify other historical events to which there were many causes. To extend this lesson, you can ask your students to write a short essay underlining some of the causes of the Salem Witchcraft hysteria.

What kind of evidence was used during these trials?
Were the accused innocent until proven guilty?
Think about the vocabulary used in these court cases. Who makes reference to the Bible - the accused, the judges, the accusers, everyone? When do they reference the Bible? Why do you think they make these references?
What were the punishments for witchcraft? Were they appropriate punishments?
Who were the witnesses, if any? What did they add to the court proceedings? Was their testimony useful? Does it seem to have been taken into account by the judge? To which witnesses, or which testimonies, is more attention paid?
What pressures did the accusers face? The judges?
What kinds of things were the 'witches' accused of causing to happen?
Have students write a story, letter, or diary entry from the perspective of one of the afflicted. The writing should involve some or all of the following: personal feelings of the historical figure, description of 'fits' and other sensations experienced by the 'afflicted', an accusation, a court trial or recollections from a court trial, remorse. If students prefer, they may write a story, letter, or diary entry from the perspective of one of the accused, or from a judge or other court official. Again, the writing should be relevant to the historical event. Use these stories as an insight into the depth of understanding students have about the experience of the Salem Witch Trials. Students should either orally present their work or provide a written essay justifying the choices they made in their entry. What historical evidence supports their viewpoint?
As a possible introductory activity before examining life in Puritan New England (in Activity 1), have your students analyze their own belief systems so that they can better see the similarities and differences between their culture and that of Salem at this time. Ask your students to write down what they know about the religion to which they ascribe, or the rules that they have to follow as a result of being a part of their particular cultural heritage or society. This may be a good take-home activity, in which parents can also be involved. See attached sample worksheet: What are the Cultures that Shape You?
If you wish to enter the realm of historical fiction, a younger audience (ages 9–11) might appreciate The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. A more mature audience might appreciate The Crucible by Arthur Miller, or even The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. EDSITEment has a lesson plan on The Crucible, Dramatizing History in Arthur Miller's The Crucible .

Recommended Websites

Digital History: The Puritans
Digital History: The Puritan Idea of the Covenant
Words About the Word 'Witch'
Causes for the Outbreak of Witchcraft Hysteria in Salem
Important Persons in the Salem Court Records
Native American Indians 1680–1720
Place in Time: Land and People
Points of Contact: Sharing and Adapting
Struggle for Freedom: "Run-away from his Master"
Working: "Servant for Life"
"Black Yankees": Slavery in New England
Newcomers 1680–1720
John Dane Battle's Life's Temptations
petition for bail from accused witches

Materials & Media

Understanding the salem witch trials: worksheet 1, understanding the salem witch trials: worksheet 2, related on edsitement, salem witch trials: understanding the hysteria, arthur miller’s the crucible : witch hunting for the classroom, harrowing halloween: spooky, supernatural, and suspenseful, dramatizing history in arthur miller's the crucible.

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Salem Witch Trials: Hysteria, Broomsticks, and Genealogy

Special Issue Editors

Special Issue Information

Published papers.

A special issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 February 2020) | Viewed by 511

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Special issue editor.

Dear Colleagues,

Genealogy is now accepting submissions for a Special Issue on the theme, “Salem Witch Trials: Hysteria, Broomsticks, and Genealogy.” Focused on the 1692 Village of Salem (Massachusetts) Witch Trials, this issue invites essays from scholars employing genealogy as a methodology and model of theoretical inquiry representing a wide range of disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences (including philosophy, geography, urban studies, and cultural theory.) Broadly conceived, the editorial team is interested in articles which examine all genealogical aspects of the Salem Witch Trials.

Some of the topics that would be appropriate for this special issue include but are not limited to:

How the Salem Witch Trials caused or impacted:
Cultural oppression
Gender performance
Racial or ethnic identity and/or performance
Removal from land or seizure of property
Prosecution, incarceration, and death penalty
Economic or political exploitation
Outcomes of the Salem Witch Trials, including but not limited to:
Community spaces
Community-based initiatives and practices
Artistic (or other) expression

Dr. Amy M. Smith Guest Editor

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website . Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form . Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Witch Trials
community-based
gender performance
racial/ethnic performance
incarceration
cultural oppression
American Colonial

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IMAGES

86 Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics You Can Use
Salem Witch Trials Choice Board by The Caffeinated Historian
Documents of the Salem Witch Trials • ABC-CLIO
Salem Witch Trials worksheet by Philip Mazzetta
Salem Witch Trialss Essay Example for Free
Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Thesis

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COMMENTS

83 Salem Witch Trials Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
The narcissism and egocentrism of Abigail lead her to accuse others. The Salem Witch Trials History. Salem is a village in Massachusetts, which is a state in the New England region, in the North East of the United States of America. We will write. a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts.
Suggestions on Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics
The Salem witch trials were prosecutions conducted of people indicted for witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people faced accusations of witchcraft. Thirty were found guilty, and nineteen of them were executed by hanging. Fourteen of the victims were women and five men, but an unknown number ...
Salem Witch Trials
The infamous Salem witch trials were a series of prosecutions for witchcraft starting in 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. Learn about what led to the allegations and the hundreds of people ...
(PDF) SALEM WITCHCRAFT TRIALS: THE PERCEPTION OF WOMEN ...
The notorious witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, occurring in 1692, have been studied from many perspectives including social, cultural, religious, historical, legal, medical, and psychological.
PDF Marc Callis, "The Aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials in Colonial
The effects of the Salem Village witch trials were devastating: 141 people imprisoned, 19 people executed, and two more died from other causes directly related to the investigations.1 The Salem witch trials would account for a quarter of all people executed for the crime of witchcraft in the history of New England,2 and would furthermore prove
Salem Witch Trials
Summary. The Salem Witch Trials are one of the best known, most studied, and most important events in early American history. The afflictions started in Salem Village (present-day Danvers), Massachusetts, in January 1692, and by the end of the year the outbreak had spread throughout Essex County, and threatened to bring down the newly formed Massachusetts Bay government of Sir William Phips.
Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of
Sociological explanations of the Salem witch trials, and of witch-hunts in the West more generally, have focused on economic transition, political instability, and the functional aspects of witchcraft belief. A more interpretive approach to the explanation of Salem is proposed: an analysis of the intersection of the gendered symbolization of ...
Salem Witch Trials
The Salem witch trials have gripped American imaginations ever since they occurred in 1692. At the end of the 17th century, after years of mostly resisting witch hunts and witch trial prosecutions, Puritans in New England suddenly found themselves facing a conspiracy of witches in a war against Satan and his minions.
Salem Witch Trials Essays
Salem Witch Trials Essay Topics and Outline Examples Essay Title 1: The Salem Witch Trials: An Examination of Mass Hysteria and Its Consequences Thesis Statement: The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were a tragic chapter in American history characterized by mass hysteria, social dynamics, and the persecution of innocent individuals, and this essay ...
(PDF) Salem Witch Trials and Their Effects on Community ...
This comparative analysis examines the Salem witch trials of the late 17th century and the COVID-19 pandemic of the 21st century to draw parallels and contrasts between these seemingly disparate ...
The Salem Witch Trials Research Papers
The Salem Witch Trials was one of the most tragic and excessively violent, gender-specific events in early American history. This article explores how the Trials and accusations of spectral evidence against women occurred as a method of sovereign oppression to subdue and displace the contumacious behaviors into visual spectacles of carnivalesque performativity both in 1692 and modern-day Salem.
Salem witch trials
The Salem trials occurred late in the sequence, after the abatement of the European witch-hunt fervour, which peaked from the 1580s and '90s to the 1630s and '40s. Some three-fourths of those European witch hunts took place in western Germany, the Low Countries, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland. The number of trials and executions ...
The Salem Witch Trials Critical Essays
Salem Witch Trials 1692-1693. An infamous episode in American history, the Salem witch trials of 1692 resulted in the execution by hanging of fourteen women and five men accused of being witches ...
86 Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics You Can Use
Interesting Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics. The role of gender in the Salem Witch Trials. The importance of literacy and education during this period. How events surrounding the Salem Witch Trials shaped American culture for years to come. The use of torture during these trials. How people were accused of the witch during this period.
Salem Witch Trials
39 essay samples found. The Salem Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. Essays could delve into the historical context, the societal and religious factors contributing to the witch trials, and the lasting impact on American history ...
Salem Witch Trials Research Paper Topics
The 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials is a dreadful piece of writing that has great significance in modern society. The Salem witch trials have triggered varied emotions in the subject of religion, feuds, and politics. The Salem witch trials have some of the most dreadful events that have negative and positive effects on society.
The Salem Witch Trials: a Dark Chapter in American History
This essay about the Salem Witch Trials examines the historical context, key events, and lasting impact of this dark period in American history. It explores how the trials, occurring in Salem, Massachusetts, between 1692 and 1693, were fueled by a combination of political instability, economic hardship, and deep-seated religious beliefs.
Understanding the Salem Witch Trials
In 1691, a group of girls from Salem, Massachusetts accused an Indian slave named Tituba of witchcraft, igniting a hunt for witches that left 19 men and women hanged, one man pressed to death, and over 150 more people in prison awaiting a trial. In this lesson, students will explore the characteristics of the Puritan community in Salem, learn about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and try to ...
Salem Witch Trials: Hysteria, Broomsticks, and Genealogy
Dear Colleagues, Genealogy is now accepting submissions for a Special Issue on the theme, "Salem Witch Trials: Hysteria, Broomsticks, and Genealogy." Focused on the 1692 Village of Salem (Massachusetts) Witch Trials, this issue invites essays from scholars employing genealogy as a methodology and model of theoretical inquiry representing a wide range of disciplines, from the humanities and ...