The 5 Best Non-Fiction Books About The Salem Witch Trials
The 5 Best Non-Fiction Books about the Salem Witch Trials
One of the darkest time in American history is the Salem Witch Trials. The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions that took place in 1692 in colonial Massachusetts, particularly in the village of Salem. The trials were fueled by a climate of fear, religious extremism and superstition. The accusations primarily targeted women and the trials resulted in the execution of 20 individuals—14 women and 6 men—by hanging. One man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea.
The trials were marked by the use of spectral evidence (testimony about dreams and visions) and harsh interrogation methods based in hysterics. The hysteria that led to the trials eventually subsided, and the events are now widely recognized as a dark chapter in American history, illustrating the dangers of unchecked fear and the erosion of due process. The trials left a lasting impact on American jurisprudence, influencing legal thought on the importance of fairness and evidence in legal proceedings.
If you’re interested in going deeper into the Salem Witch trials, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best non-fiction books about the Salem Witch Trials.
The Crucible
By Arthur Miller. A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community
The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller’s edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft—and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.
First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witch-hunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can.
Get The Crucible by Arthur Miller on Amazon here!
A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience
Historians have speculated on a web of possible causes for the witchcraft that stated in Salem and spread across the region-religious crisis, ergot poisoning, an encephalitis outbreak, frontier war hysteria–but most agree that there was no single factor. Rather, as Emerson Baker illustrates in this seminal new work, Salem was “a perfect storm”: a unique convergence of conditions and events that produced something extraordinary throughout New England in 1692 and the following years, and which has haunted us ever since.
Baker shows how a range of factors in the Bay colony in the 1690s, including a new charter and government, a lethal frontier war, and religious and political conflicts, set the stage for the dramatic events in Salem. Engaging a range of perspectives, he looks at the key players in the outbreak–the accused witches and the people they allegedly bewitched, as well as the judges and government officials who prosecuted them–and wrestles with questions about why the Salem tragedy unfolded as it did, and why it has become an enduring legacy.
Salem in 1692 was a critical moment for the fading Puritan government of Massachusetts Bay, whose attempts to suppress the story of the trials and erase them from memory only fueled the popular imagination. Baker argues that the trials marked a turning point in colonial history from Puritan communalism to Yankee independence, from faith in collective conscience to skepticism toward moral governance. A brilliantly told tale, A Storm of Witchcraft also puts Salem’s storm into its broader context as a part of the ongoing narrative of American history and the history of the Atlantic World.
A Delusion Of Satan: The Full Story Of The Salem Witch Trials
Get A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials by Frances Hill on Amazon here!
A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse
By Daniel A. Gagnon. In the winter of 1692 something terrible and frightening began in Salem Village. It started with several villagers having strange fits, screaming, and unnaturally contorting themselves, and ended with almost two hundred people in jail, and at least twenty-five dead. Witchcraft accusations—claims that some inhabitants had forsaken God to become servants of the Devil—spread from Salem Village across Massachusetts, ensnaring innocent people from all strata of society under a burden of assumed guilt. One of the most significant accusations, and most unlikely, was against a seventy-one-year-old grandmother, Rebecca Nurse.
The accusations against Nurse, a well-respected member in the community, seemed unbelievable. Unflinchingly, this ailing elderly woman insisted on her innocence and refused to falsely confess. Supported by many in Salem, Nurse’s family and neighbors challenged her accusers in court and prepared a thorough defense for her, yet nothing could surmount the fear of witchcraft, and she was sentenced to death. Nurse, seen as a martyr for the truth, later became the first person accused of witchcraft to be memorialized in North America.
In A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse, the first full account of Nurse’s life, Daniel A. Gagnon vividly recreates seventeenth-century Salem, and in the process challenges previous interpretations of Nurse’s life and the 1692 witch hunt in general. Through primary source research, he reveals how the Nurse family’s role in several disputes prior to the witch hunt was different than previously thought, as well as how Nurse’s case helps answer the important question of whether the accusations of witchcraft were caused by mental illness or malicious intent. A Salem Witch reveals a remarkable woman whose legacy has transformed how the witch hunt has been remembered and memorialized.
Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials
Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch TrialsBy Marilynne K. Roach. The story of the Salem Witch Trials told through the lives of six women
Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the twenty who were executed and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had been accused, 74 had been “afflicted,” 32 had officially accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn’t include the religious, judicial, and governmental leaders. All this adds up to what the Rev. Cotton Mather called “a desolation of names.”
The individuals involved are too often reduced to stock characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to indignation. And although the flood of names and detail in the history of an extraordinary event like the Salem witch trials can swamp the individual lives involved, individuals still deserve to be remembered and, in remembering specific lives, modern readers can benefit from such historical intimacy. By examining the lives of six specific women, Marilynne Roach shows readers what it was like to be present throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to live through it unchanged.
