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Witchcraft traditionally means the use of magic or supernatural powers to harm others. A practitioner is a witch. In medieval and early modern Europe, where the term originated, accused witches were usually women who were believed to have attacked their own community, and often to have communed with evil beings. It was thought witchcraft could be thwarted by protective magic or counter-magic, which could be provided by cunning folk or folk healers. Suspected witches were also intimidated, banished, attacked or killed. Often they would be formally prosecuted and punished, if found guilty or simply believed to be guilty. European witch-hunts and witch trials in the early modern period led to tens of thousands of executions. Although some folk healers were accused of witchcraft, they made up a minority of those accused. European belief in witchcraft gradually dwindled during and after the Age of Enlightenment.
The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists. Miller was questioned by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging. One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail.
Bridget Bishop was the first person executed for witchcraft during the Salem witch trials in 1692. Nineteen were hanged, and one, Giles Corey, was pressed to death. Altogether, about 200 people were tried.
Lewis Putnam Turco is an American poet, teacher, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. Turco is an advocate for Formalist poetry in the United States.
Eunice Cole, maiden name unknown, was a woman from the coast of New Hampshire. Better known as "Goody Cole", she is the only woman convicted of witchcraft in New Hampshire.
Martha Corey was accused and convicted of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials, on September 9, 1692, and was hanged on September 22, 1692. Her second husband, Giles Corey, was also accused.
The Francis Parkman Prize, named after Francis Parkman, is awarded by the Society of American Historians for the best book in American history each year. Its purpose is to promote literary distinction in historical writing. The Society of American Historians is an affiliate of the American Historical Association.
Mercy Lewis was an accuser during the Salem Witch Trials. She was born in Falmouth, Maine. Mercy Lewis, formally known as Mercy Allen, was the child of Philip Lewis and Mary (Cass) Lewis.
Rebecca Nurse was a woman who was accused of witchcraft and executed by hanging in New England during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. She was fully exonerated less than twenty years later.
Eunice Williams, also known as Marguerite Kanenstenhawi Arosen, was an English colonist taken captive by French and Mohawk warriors from Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704. Taken to Canada with more than 100 other captives, the seven-year-old girl was adopted by a recently converted Mohawk family at Kahnawake and was fully assimilated into Mohawk society. Baptized as a Catholic under the name "Marguerite" and renamed A'ongonte meaning "she has been planted as a person," she eventually married a Mohawk man, François-Xavier Arosen, had several children, and remained with the Mohawk for the rest of her life. While choosing not to return to her natal family, she, along with her children, repeatedly made the trek to Deerfield to visit with her Puritan siblings over the course of her life. Her father, Rev. John Williams and her brother Samuel made numerous efforts to ransom her to no avail. Moreover, they failed to persuade her to return to Massachusetts and the bosom of her birth family. Hers was one of the more famous Indian captivity stories.
Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut — sometimes Achsah Young or Alice Young — was the first recorded instance of execution for witchcraft in the thirteen American colonies. She had one child, Alice Beamon (Young), born in 1640, who was also condemned for the same crime thirty years later in the 1670s, but was not hanged.
Hans Christian Erik Midelfort, is C. Julian Bishko Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist of the German Reformation and the history of Christianity in Early Modern Europe.
Medical explanations of bewitchment, especially as exhibited during the Salem witch trials but in other witch-hunts as well, have emerged because it is not widely believed today that symptoms of those claiming affliction were actually caused by bewitchment. The reported symptoms have been explored by a variety of researchers for possible biological and psychological origins.
Rachel Clinton, born in Sudbury, Suffolk, England, to Richard and Martha Haffield, was a survivor of the Salem witch trials.
John Williams was a New England Puritan minister who was the noted pastor of Deerfield from 1688 to his death. He and most of his family were taken captive in the Raid on Deerfield in 1704 during Queen Anne's War. He was held by the French in Montreal for more than two years, who wanted a high-ranking French pirate in exchange. After being released in late 1706, Williams became even more notable for The Redeemed Captive (1707), his account of his captivity. It became a well-known work in the genre of captivity narratives.
Rebecca Kellogg Ashley was an English child captured by allied French, Canadian militia, Iroquois, and Algonquin soldiers in the 1704 Deerfield Raid. The Deerfield attack was part of the decade-long Queen Anne's War. Rebecca was eight years old. Eunice Williams was captured in this same raid, as was her father, John Williams who wrote about his captive experience in The Redeemed Captive. Like Eunice and several other children from Deerfield, Rebecca Kellogg was adopted by Haudenosaunee Mohawks in the town of Kahnawake. She married and she raised children.
Brian Paul Levack is an American historian of early modern Britain and Europe.
Stephen Nissenbaum, is Professor Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's History Department specializing in early American history through to the nineteenth century. Most notably, he co-authored a book with Paul Boyer in 1974 about the Salem witch trials, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, called "a landmark in early American studies" by John Putnam Demos.
Mary Black was a slave of African descent in the household of Nathaniel Putnam of the Putnam family who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. Nathaniel's nephew was Thomas Putnam, one of the primary accusers, though Nathaniel himself was skeptical and even defended Rebecca Nurse. Mary was arrested, indicted, and imprisoned, but did not go to trial, and was released by proclamation on January 21, 1693 [O.S. January 11, 1692]. She returned to Nathaniel's household after she was released, another indication of Nathaniel's view of the charges against her.
