The Salem Witch Trials are known as a series of people being accused and prosecuted of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts beginning in February 1692 until May 1693. The trials began after a group of girls claimed that they were possessed by the devil. Several local women were accused of witchcraft and this began the wave of hysteria that would forever haunt Salem and leave a painful legacy for a long time to come. Nearly every major school of historians has attempted to explain the answer to the mystery of the trials, trying to understand why they occurred. From Marxists who blame class conflict, to Freudians who believe in mass hysteria, the more ecologically based historians who put the blame on hallucinogenic ergot fungus, and now more…
It was extremely easy to be accused of being a witch in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth century. During this time period, Europe was going through many changes such as the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the consolidation of many national governments. Although all of these changes were taking place, many people were stuck in their ways and did not approve of these new changes. The people that did not follow the social and political norm of the time were often accused of witchcraft.The most common reasons of persecutions of individuals as witches were if you were a female, if you were middle age and not married(widowed), or if you were not practicing Christianity.…
Vengeance is a powerful thing in Salem. With young women accusing anyone as witches and putting them on trial hoping they will be hung made certain people believe these women were seeking revenge. There were multiple accounts of young women having conflicts with good citizens and later bringing them trial. For example Mary Warren versus Sarah Good.…
Overall I think the salem witch trials were caused by ergotism, growing lies and fame/jealousy. Ergotism was causing many problems throughout the colonies which eventually caused innocent men and women to be hanged. Also once the girls started lying, they could not stop because their superstition kept growing. Lastly the girls might have wanted to get famous for their work and to get rid of…
In Rosalyn Schanzer´s Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem, extreme disorder in civilization took place due to massive amounts of unjust witch accusations. In early 1692, mass chaos struck Salem Village, Massachusetts. In a ravenous sprint to gain revenge and play a game of kill-or-be-killed, approximately 200 people were accused of witchcraft. 20 of these were executed. Families turned on each other, civilians accused one another of unimaginable things, and all because of two girls. Betty Parris and Abigail Williams who together accused a staggering portion of the innocent so called ´witches´. Many people question the motives of these two. It is hard to imagine two young girls under the care of such a high public figure…
Salem was one of the most popular places where witches were executed, because people where afraid of devil which shows the Miller's story The Crucible. This horrible fear shaped the society of Salem and as it happened a lot of women were killed. As Dorothy Thompson said: "The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness". The book which I read is the story about how the society was manipulated by the fear of the unknown or different. Therefore, in my opinion people in Salem were afraid of a devil and this fear shaped their society to judge and perceive normal women as witches and in consequences killed them.…
In Exodus 22:18, it proclaims, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” In 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, the Puritans believed every word that the Bible said, causing the death of twenty people because they were accused of witchcraft. What caused the panic and alarm that lead to the death of twenty people in Salem? There were three causes: conflict between young girls and older women, lying teenagers, economic and political power divided between two sides of town.…
There was a certain time in a woman's life where she was most afraid of being accused. This was middle-age. When we think of witches, we generally think of older women, but the book proved that myth false. Younger women generally weren't suspect to being accused. "Women under forty were unlikely witches in Puritan society" (p. 65). After a woman turned forty, they began to fear being accused. "Almost 40 percent of older accused women were brought to trial and well over half of those tried were convicted" (p. 66). The book successfully proves that women over forty were the main focus of those who accuse people of being…
The Salem Witch Trials article from History.com states, “On March 1, Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, an Indian slave from Barbados, became the first Salem residents to be charged with the capital crime of witchcraft.” (Salem Witch Trials Documentary). All of these listed victims were women, and one of them was a slave. At the time, women did not have as much of a say as men, because they were seen as morally weaker. This idea originated from the Bible’s telling of Adam and Eve, when Eve gave into the Devil’s temptations (Salem Witch Trials Documentary). In the Puritan settlement, women and girls were forced to stay in the house all day and clean, while the men worked outside. A documentary from History.com states that, “once settlements started to grow… girls and women started to behave in new and different ways, that many men--and women--found threatening” (Salem Witch Trials Documentary). The people who had control over the trials were the religious leaders/politicians; they were all…
The Salem witch trials scared many people during its time. During this time people accused each other of being witches. Many of the accused were killed because they would not admit to being a witch. The causes of the Salem witch trials were town division, lying girls, and jealousy.…
In early times people didn’t understand reason. Especially the Puritans who only saw God’s will and the evilness of the devil. During the Salem witchcraft crisis, Puritans struggled to decipher communal security and find the truth around them. They believed that Satan recruited humans to do his evil and be servants to him, i.e. witches. The witches had a magical power that allowed them to harm others. To protect the community the judges of the town took it upon themselves to hold jury trials and hang the witches as punishment. Many believed the witches were burned at the stake, however that is untrue.…
From June to September of 1692 nineteen men and women we accused of witchcraft. Some would say the findings of the Court of Oyer and Terminer are justified, but I believe in a concrete theory. Secrets of the Dead: Witch’s Curse depicts on the Ergot Theory, which believes the “bewitched” were suffering from a side effect of the fungi Ergot.…
The Salem Witch Trials began in Salem, Massachusetts in the winter months of 1692 when Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece of Reverend Parris, began to have fits described as "beyond the power of natural disease to effect" by Reverend John Hale (Source B). The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, and crawled under furniture. The girls also complained of being pinched and pricked with pins. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical evidence of any ailment. As other young women in the village began to exhibit similar behaviors, they began to accuse women and men who lived in their town of bewitching them. By the time the girls were finished accusing the innocent citizens of their village, nineteen had been hung, one had been crushed to death, and as many as thirteen others died while in prison.…
The witch craze in Europe lasted from the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century. Women were targets to persecution. Witchcraft had already been considered evil but religious conflicts from the Reformation started another uprising. People, women in particular, were being persecuted as witches for suspicious behavior, fear of the unknown and religious beliefs along with ignorance. People being suspicious and accusing of others was a main source for persecution.…
However most of the victims executed during the witchcraft trials were innocent. It all began in 1692 when people began screaming and doing strange dances in the woods. As the settlers began to notice the strange events occurring. They decided that the punishment for witchcraft was death. The only way some lived was when they confessed and helped convicted others. Some of the confessors lied and pointed fingers at innocent. During the salem witchcraft 20 people were executed. Now some people suggest the girls were suffering from epilepsy, boredom, child abuse, mental illness. One woman named Susannah Martin was accused of witchcraft. She had been accused of witchcraft before but she was found innocent. This time she was accused again by her neighbors and was hanged. Susannah had been extremely religious. While she was waiting for execution she comforted herself by reading her bible. Later on it was found that she had been linked to an inheritance dispute. During this time people were scared and miss judged some things. “It was the darkest and most desponding period in the civil history of New England. The people, whose ruling passion then was, as it has ever since been, a love for constitutional rights, had, a few years before, been thrown into dismay by the loss of their charter, and, from that time, kept in a feverish state of anxiety respecting their political destinies”( Brooks 1). After the witch trials ended people realized that some of the things done was…