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Salem Witch Trials: Witchcraft
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The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before local magistrates followed by county court trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex Counties of colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with even more accused who were not formally pursued by the authorities. The two courts convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged. One man, refusing to enter a plea, was ordered to be crushed to death under heavy stones. At least five more of the accused died in prison.
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The Salem Witchcraft Trials became the largest witch hunt in American history.. The hunt occured in 1692, Salem, Massachusetts. Many people were accused of being a witch, resulting in being hanged or punished. Nineteen men and women, were convicted and hanged. Another man was pressed to death with two large stones because he refused to admit he was guilty. About 150 other people were jailed on witchcraft charges.
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Salem WItch Trials is an excellent source of information for women's studies. Biographies of “afflicted women” (accused witches), the trial transcriptions, and contemporary books (1690-1800 imprints) reveal attitudes towards and the socio-cultural milieu for women. One example of such attitudes is apparent in the biography of one of the hanged, Ann Pudaetor. Biographical information about the accused shows that women who defied the gender standard of the unassertive, dependent, and docile female put themselves at great risk to be singled out for punishment through witchcraft accusations.
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The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the Devil's magic—and 20 were executed. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted. Since then, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice, and it continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later.
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Few events in American history are as well remembered as the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. But there was another witch hunt that year, in Stamford, Connecticut, that has never been examined in depth. Now Richard Godbeer describes this "other witch hunt" in a concise, fascinating narrative that illuminates the colonial world and shatters the stereotype of early New Englanders as quick to accuse and condemn. That stereotype originates with Salem, which was in many ways unlike other outbreaks of witch-hunting in the region. Drawing on eye-witness testimony, Godbeer tells the story of Kate Branch, a seventeen-year-old afflicted by strange visions and given to blood-chilling wails of pain and fright. Branch accused several women of bewitching her, two of whom were put on trial for witchcraft.
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In 1692 the community of Salem, Massachusetts, was engulfed in a series of witchcraft afflictions, accusations, trials, and executions. During the course of the year, more than a dozen persons claimed to be afflicted by spells of black magic and sorcery that had been allegedly cast by men and women who had enlisted the supernatural powers of the devil. Most of the persons claiming to be afflicted were teenage girls.
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