Bridget Bishop (died 1692) was a tavern keeper whose wild temperament and flamboyant dress enventually caused her to be tried and hanged for witchcraft. The seventeenth century was a time of great religious excitement both in Europe and America. The...

The Salem Trials: Interrogation of Susannah Martin Reprinted in Eyewitness to America in 1997 Cotton Mather, a Boston minister and a strong supporter of witch-hunts, and Ezekial Cheever, a court clerk, wrote an account of the Salem trials of 1692-93....

The pre-trial hearings in the cases of Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba set the stage for the social strife that would soon rip Salem apart. (See Chapter 3 for information on the circumstances that led to the arrests of these three women on...

The witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693 are remembered today as a tragic chapter in American history. The trials are generally considered to be a unique and isolated flare-up of European superstitions that had been...

Mather-Cheever Account of the Salem Witch Trials Reprinted in Eyewitness to America Published in 1997 Samuel Sewall Diary Entries of Samuel Sewall Reprinted in Early American Writing Published in 1994 "It was noted that in her, as in others like...

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....

Here's an idea for a Halloween jaunt: Plan a pilgrimage to the site of your favorite horror movie or scary story. Whether your taste runs to Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King or news accounts of infamous crimes, "Creepy Crawls: A...

Was she casting spells or teaching spelling? In an unfolding trial, lawyers are debating a former teacher's claims in a $2 million federal lawsuit that she was improperly fired from Hampton Bays elementary school because administrators and others thought she was a witch.Lauren Berrios, 37,...

Party Of Retreat: The Senate's top Democrat has announced to terrorists a U.S. surrender in Iraq. Considering our new strategy's documented successes, Harry Reid's determination to lose is practically treasonous.In a week that saw the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, and a Senate committee...

THE ASSAULT ON REASON By Al Gore The Penguin Press, 308 pages, $25.95 If anyone has the right to fulminate on the irrationality of American political debate, it’s Al Gore. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, the national media turned him into a hapless unofficial...

In the following excerpt, Kittredge asserts that belief in witchcraft was common throughout history and points out that the witchcraft trials in the American colonies were remarkably limited in number.

In the following excerpt, Godbeer explores the ways in which catastrophes and threats of invasion created widespread fear and xenophobia in pre-1692 New England.

In the following excerpt, Koehler discusses the issues of empowerment and non-traditional behavior in examining why a disproportionate number of the accused witches and their accusers were female.

In 1692, within a small Puritan village, tragedy struck. This tragedy later became known as the Salem Witch Trials. Society has a tendency of viewing the people of Salem as ignorant or cruel, But in many ways, these people were just like us- with their own beliefs, fears, challenges, petty disagreements, and even jealousies.

As soon as the British had settled into their new colonies in New England, nineteen people were hanged because people thought that they were witches in Salem, Massachusetts. The thought of witchcraft drifted off to about twenty-two different Massachusetts communities, and concerned people from New York to Maine. But the majority of the trails took place in Salem.

The parallels linking the Communist scare of the 1950s, the Salem witch trials (as described in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible"), and racial profiling after the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.