Review: Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft (2015)

A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience by Emerson W. Baker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a perfectly reasonable write-up of what happened at Salem. The most interesting section was where he mapped out the connections by marriage between the judges. Five of the nine had married each other's sisters or were otherwise related, and they were all friends and long-time associates in the government of the colony and members of the same churches and business partners in land speculations. John Demos has a great bit in Entertaining Satan where he talks about how dense relationships were in colonial New England, and this is a perfect example. (Someone else points out somewhere that the population of colonial New England would fit in Yankee Stadium.)



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