![]() ![]() ![]() "America’s possession obsession really goes back to 1692, when twenty men and women suspected of witchery were killed in Salem, Massachusetts. Always drawing on first-hand sources, she illustrates the historical background to the witchhunt and shows how the trials have been represented, and sometimes distorted, by historians - and how they have fired the imaginations of poets, playwrights, and novelists. In The Salem Witch Trials Reader, Frances Hill provides - and astutely comments upon - the actual documents from the episode: transcripts of the examinations of suspected witches, eyewitness accounts of "Satanic influence," and the testimony of those who retained their reason and defied the madness. Within two years, twenty men and women are hanged or pressed to death and over a hundred others imprisoned and impoverished. Against the backdrop of a Puritan theocracy threatened by change, in a population terrified not only of eternal damnation but also of the earthly dangers of Indian massacres and recurrent smallpox epidemics, a small group of girls denounces a black slave and others as worshipers of Satan. ![]()
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