Reasons For The Salem Witch Trials

In New England, mass agitation and paranoia resulted in a notorious episode of American history known as the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. What started as an amount of accusations from a group of girls, turned into a series of disastrous events. These girls accused several local woman of the small town of Salem located in the state of Massachusetts of playing with the devil, casting spells and being witches. This series of events was considered a new phenomenon in America, but across Europe it was not since massive witch hunts have been going on for more than three hundred years. The motivations for the Salem With Trials were religious; these religious motivations came from the Holy Scriptures the Bible and also the fifteenth-century book the
In centuries of witch-hunts, millions of women are captured, tortured and burned alive at the stake some of them innocents. In 1629, the King Charles I of England granted a religious group called the Puritans to settle and govern Salem. Puritans believed the Church of England could be purified from the Roman Catholic practices. The Puritans main goal was to create a utopia, so basically a perfect society that follows the Holy Bible and a society free of sinners. They were not tolerant towards others believes or practices and were very harsh when it came to their punishments. They had very strict rules that you had to follow, and if you didn’t people would pay the consequences. For Puritan men, women were expected to act a certain way; they were not in the same social level as men were. Puritans considered woman morally weak and submissive. Education was highly valued by puritans because they believed that in order to be closer to God they must know how to read the Bible. They thought the devil is smart so they must have education to be able to outfox
On June 2, on a witchcraft case, Bridget Bishop was found guilty and hanged, the next month five more people were hanged, five more in August and another nine more in the following month. Some of the accused women, died in prison. By 1963, the accusations were not believed anymore, May Phips had forgiven and released all those in prison waiting to be executed for witchcraft charges. Samuel Sewall, one of the leading members of the court apologized for the actions he took during the process and this officially ended the witch trials. But a number of apologies does not erase the events occurred. After hundred of years, it was believed that the girls were making the accusations up, that they were doing it for attention to be a focus in the community. By 1992, a memorial of granite was built with the inscription ‘‘In Memory of Those Innocents Who Died During the Salem Village Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692’’ dedicated to all the victims during the