Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials
At the end of the 17th century, more than 200 people in Salem, Massachusetts were arrested and 20 executed. Their alleged crime? Practicing witchcraft. Smithsonian magazine's new article "A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials" summarizes the story behind the intolerance and injustice that erupted into absolute hysteria.
From Smithsonian:
Several centuries ago, many practicing Christians, and those of other religions, had a strong belief that the Devil could give certain people known as witches the power to harm others in return for their loyalty. A "witchcraft craze" rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. Hundreds of thousands of supposed witches—mostly women—were executed. Though the Salem trials came on just as the European craze was winding down, local circumstances explain their onset.Link
In 1689, English rulers William and Mary started a war with France in the American colonies. Known as King William's War to colonists, it ravaged regions of upstate New York, Nova Scotia and Quebec, sending refugees into the county of Essex and, specifically, Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (Salem Village is present-day Danvers, Massachusetts; colonial Salem Town became what's now Salem.)
The displaced people created a strain on Salem's resources. This aggravated the existing rivalry between families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem and those who still depended on agriculture. Controversy also brewed over Reverend Samuel Parris, who became Salem Village's first ordained minister in 1698, and was disliked because of his rigid ways and greedy nature. The Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the Devil.
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The theory that ergot caused the symptoms of those 'bewitched' was disproved by historians almost as soon as it was proposed in the 1970s, yet here it is again...
The wikipedia article on the Trials covers it in somewhat better fashion.
How could this happen, the word of god says specifically to not kill.
oh, wait, theres also that bit that specifically says to kill witches.
Its a good thing people aren't evil robots like nomad on star trek, the bible would have put us into a logic loop a millenia ago.
Remember that bit about the hundreds of thousands of women executed in Europe when the next apologist attempts to explain away the witch hunt as an isolated madness.
If you want to see just how starkly the Salem tragedy was caused by economic and social tensions, check out this map of the homes of the accusers and accused-
http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/salemwitchtrials/life/divisions.html
I think there's a typo? It says Parris was ordained in 1698, but that would have been 6 years after the trials.
Prufrock451, that's a great link. The pattern of the less well-off being the accusers is fascinating- this seems the be the reverse of what happened in the earlier trials in the UK, certainly in Warboys, the one with which I'm most familiar.
Slightly off-topic I'm afraid, but I'm amazed that certain myths about the European witch-trials are being still being circulated.
This statement is dodgy. An excellent article to check out is Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt by Jenny Gibbons:
That's certainly not hundreds of thousands. And on the misogynistic angle on:
Some of my Dad's ancestors moved to Salem early on - details at http://www.dpsinfo.com/tree/trask/
if you're interested.
Luckily, my line of ancestors left Salem for nearby Beverly about 20 years before "the troubles." I'm glad about that!
As it was, one relative was tenuously involved in witchcraft:
Christian, wife of John Trask of Salem, "being violently asalted by the temptations of Satan, cut her own throate with a paire of sisers to the astonishment and grief of all, especially her most near relations."
But if you look at what Christian had been going through around the time of her death, post-partum depression is a much more rational reason for her suicide than witchcraft.
The map PRUFROCK451 links to was created in the 1970s by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum at UMass/Amherst, and has become iconic as an explanation for why things happened in Salem Village as they did -- the farmers far away from the merchant-oriented town were suffering economically and were taking their revenge on the villagers who lived closer to town and had more connections to the town. Unfortunately for all the AP US History students being tested on this, the data used to create this map and draw these conclusion has been proven recently to be seriously flawed by two scholars.
Benjamin Ray at the University of Virginia has gone back and reviewed all the markers on this map, and found that there are errors in the placement of a variety of them, and that MANY people are missing, making the data essentially cherry-picked. When the correct points are made on the map, there is a more even distribution, and not this remarkable-looking geographical separation.
Richard Latner at Tulane University has pointed out that the financial status of the accused v. accused was taken from a single data point, the tax roles of one year, 1695, which was, strangely, three years AFTER the events, when the 1690 tax roles were available. When he evaluated the 1690 tax roles, he could not reproduce Boyer & Nissenbaum's findings from the 1695 tax roles. Latner then examined the tax roles over several decades before and after, and discovered that the figures in 1695 turned out to be an anomaly. The accusing families, as a group, were actually on an economic rise, and the wealth of those accused was already on the decline.