Creating Digital Histories: The History of Places in North America
This research guide is for the students in the "Creating Digital Histories: The History of Places in North America" (HIST 506:401:03). Professor Tatiana Seijas.
Books & Dissertation
Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials by
There are few episodes in American history as interesting and controversial as the Salem Witch Trials. This work provides a revealing analysis of what it was like to live in Massachusetts during that time, creating a nuanced profile of New England Puritans and their culture. What was it like to live in the colony of Massachusetts during the last decade of the 17th century, the decade famed for the Salem Witch Trials? Daily Life during the Salem Witch Trials answers that question, offering a vivid portrait essential to anyone seeking to understand the traumatic events of the time in their proper historical context. The book begins with a historical overview tracing the development of the Puritan experiment in the Massachusetts colony from 1620 to 1692. It then explores the cultural values and day-to-day concerns of Puritan society in the late-17th century, including trends and patterns of behavior in family life, household activities, business and economics, political and military responsibilities, and religious belief. Each chapter interprets a different aspect of daily life as it was experienced by those who lived through the social crisis of the witch trials of 1692-93, helping readers better comprehend how the history-making events of those years could come to pass.
Call Number: Alexander F7.G695 2012ISBN: 9780313374586Publication Date: 2012
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt by
This book represents a comprehensive record of all legal documents pertaining to the Salem witch trials, in chronological order. Numerous manuscripts, as well as records published in earlier books that were overlooked in other editions, offer a comprehensive narrative account of the events of 1692-3, with supplementary materials stretching as far as the mid-18th century. The book can be used as a reference book or read as an unfolding narrative. All legal records are newly transcribed, and included in this edition is a historical introduction, a legal introduction, and a linguistic introduction. Manuscripts are accompanied by notes that, in many cases, identify the person who wrote the record. This has never been attempted, and much is revealed by seeing who wrote what, when.
Call Number: Law Library Newark KFM2478.8.W5 R43 2009ISBN: 9780521661669Publication Date: 2009
Switching Sides: how a generation of historians lost sympathy for the victims of the Salem witch hunt by
Why have so many recent scholars of colonial witchcraft written sympathetically about the accusers while ignoring their victims? For most historians living through the fascist and communist tyrannies that culminated in World War II and the Cold War, the Salem witch trials signified the threat to truth and individual integrity posed by mass ideological movements. Work on the trials produced in this era, including Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Marion L. Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, left little doubt that most intellectuals' sympathies lay with the twenty innocent victims who stood up to Puritan intolerance by choosing to go to their deaths rather than confess to crimes they had never committed. In Switching Sides, Tony Fels traces a remarkable shift in scholarly interpretations of the Salem witch hunt from the post-World War II era up through the present. Fels explains that for a new generation of historians influenced by the radicalism of the New Left in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Salem panic acquired a startlingly different meaning. Determined to champion the common people of colonial New England, dismissive toward liberal values, and no longer instinctively wary of utopian belief systems, the leading works on the subject to emerge from 1969 through the early 2000s highlighted economic changes, social tensions, racial conflicts, and political developments that served to unsettle the accusers in the witchcraft proceedings. These interpretations, still dominant in the academic world, encourage readers to sympathize with the perpetrators of the witch hunt, while at the same time showing indifference or even hostility toward the accused. Switching Sides is meticulously documented, but its comparatively short text aims broadly at an educated American public, for whom the Salem witch hunt has long occupied an iconic place in the nation's conscience. Readers will come away from the book with a sound knowledge of what is currently known about the Salem witch hunt--and pondering the relationship between works of history and the ideological influences on the historians who write them.
Call Number: LSM BF1576.F45 2018ISBN: 9781421424378Publication Date: 2018
Witchcraft in Early North America by
Witchcraft in Early North America investigates European, African, and Indian witchcraft beliefs and their expression in colonial America. Alison Games's engaging book takes us beyond the infamous outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, to look at how witchcraft was a central feature of colonial societies in North America. Her substantial and lively introduction orients readers to the subject and to the rich selection of documents that follows. The documents begin with first encounters between European missionaries and Native Americans in New France and New Mexico, and they conclude with witch hunts among Native Americans in the years of the early American republic. The documents--some of which have never been published previously--include excerpts from trials in Virginia, New Mexico, and Massachusetts; accounts of outbreaks in Salem, Abiquiu (New Mexico), and among the Delaware Indians; descriptions of possession; legal codes; and allegations of poisoning by slaves. The documents raise issues central to legal, cultural, social, religious, and gender history. This fascinating topic and the book's broad geographic and chronological coverage make this book ideally suited for readers interested in new approaches to colonial history and the history of witchcraft.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 9781442203594Publication Date: 2010-10-16
McNally, Deborah Colleen. 2013. “Within Patriarchy: Gender and Power in Massachusetts’s Congregational Churches, 1630–1730.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses [online].
Databases & Websites
- Salem, MA 400th Anniversary WebsiteThe "History" page presents a rich timeline of the city and its population from the 1600s to present.
- Massachusetts Indigenous CommunityBefore the arrival of the Europeans at what we now call Salem, was home to the Naumkeag band of the Massachusett/Pawtucket Tribes. This site presents resources pertaining to the Naumkeags.
- Nineteenth Century Collections OnlineIncludes primary sources (photographs, documents, etc.). Search for "Salem witchcraft."
- C19: Nineteenth Century IndexIncludes more than 20 million records for books, periodical and newspaper articles, government publications, and archival collections.