Originally written by Elaine B.
In The Witches: Salem, 1962, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra analyzes the Salem Witch Trials to offer key insights into the role of women in its events while explaining how its tragedies became possible.
It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.
Stacy Schiff writes an excellent history of the Salem witch trials in the mid-1600s. She pinpoints reasons why the fear of “witchcraft” seized the colony convincing a panicked, suspicious, oppressed community to report anyone’s (brother, sister, mother, father) deviation from exercising the posture of the ideal Puritan– leaving in their wake ingenuous victims to pick up the numbs of fractious allegations and destined to live a shattered life. Schiff does not leave the story in the 17th century, but pinpoints instances throughout the following centuries, and how the injection of fear can control and manipulate others to one’s own advantage.
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