The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents

by Richard Godbeer

The Salem witch trials stand as one of the infamous moments in colonial American history. More than 150 people -- primarily women -- from 24 communities were charged with witchcraft; 19 were hanged and others died in prison. In his introduction to this compact yet comprehensive volume, Richard Godbeer explores the beliefs, fears, and historical context that fueled the witch panic of 1692. The documents in this collection illuminate how the Puritans' worldview led them to seek a supernatural explanation for the problems vexing their community. Presented as case studies, the carefully chosen records from several specific trials offer a clear picture of the gender norms and social tensions that underlie the witchcraft accusations. The final documents cover recantations of confessions, the aftermath of the witch hunt, and statements of regret. A chronology of the witchcraft crisis, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography round out the book's pedagogical support.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, School, American History, Witches, Witchcraft, 17th Century

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2011

About the author

Richard Godbeer received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1989. He specializes in colonial and revolutionary America, with an emphasis on religious culture, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Godbeer was born in Essex, England, and grew up in Shropshire and Gloucestershire. He then lived in Oxford for three years as an undergraduate before crossing the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1984. He moved to southern California in 1989, where he taught for fifteen years at the University of California, Riverside. He moved to southern Florida in the summer of 2004 to join the Department of History at the University of Miami. He offers courses on a broad range of topics, including sex and gender in early America, witchcraft in colonial New England, religious culture in early America, and the American Revolution.

Godbeer is author of The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press and winner of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Award for the Best First Book), Sexual Revolution in Early America (published in 2002 by Johns Hopkins University Press and a featured selection of the History Book Club), Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (published in 2004 by Oxford University Press), The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (published in 2009 by Johns Hopkins University Press) and The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (published in 2011 as a volume in the Bedford Series in History and Culture). Godbeer is currently working on a joint biography of Elizabeth and Henry Drinker, a Quaker couple who lived in Philadelphia during the second half of the eighteenth century. He is grateful to have received research fellowships from a range of institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Reviews

[Twofrontteethstillcrooked · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to read this for a college course but it proved genuinely fascinating. Despite the converging pressures on the Salem folks in 1692, I'm not sure anything truly explains what the hell happened there -- somehow, a "great delusion of Satan" still sounds about right.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not one of my favorite Bedford series books ever, but Godbeer wrote up a great introduction nonetheless. The problem is that the sources themselves aren't that useful for doing or teaching gender history because the gender stuff is really more situational than located in the text. Still, a lot of the sources are pretty darn creepy and would be useful for a course in witchcraft, magic, or colonial history.

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the interpretation of documents more interesting than the actual documents.

[Ed Callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Salem Witch Trials are and remain a controversial episode in American history. It is easy for discussions of these sad events to descend into a kind of historical voyeurism which spends significant time wallowing in the lurid details of the trials and the executions, but which is all too often unable to situate these sad events against a wider colonial and global context. Godbeer does an excellent job of providing that necessary corrective.

This is not a comprehensive examination of the overall witch craze phenomenon. Godbeer is aware of and conversant with the vast corpus of this literature, and has produced a readable summary of it. But the true strength of his efforts comes in the assemblage of primary source documents which give the reader the opportunity to examine the record directly. His decision to focus upon six individuals accused of witchcraft shows how flimsily the rules of evidence were applied by the courts, and how the presumption of guilt, rather than innocence, predominated in the trials. Particularly helpful are the briefs filed by the friends of the Proctor family, protesting their innocence, and illustrating that not everybody in Salem or its surrounding neighborhoods, was on board with the prosecution of alleged witches.

What emerges between Godbeer's introduction and the primary sources is a narrative of Puritans caught up in a veritable witch's brew of factors. The overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution led to a declaration of war by France, and active military raids against English colonists by French colonists and Native American allies. The changing nature of the Massachusetts Bay colony as a result of newly arriving colonists, the growth of Salem Town and its domineering stance over Salem Village, coupled with the inability of the local physicians to identify the causes of the girls' hysteria, as well as the close intimacy and contact which was part of colonial society, created an environment rife with anxiety.

The legacy of the Salem Witch Trials has been long lasting. Godbeer never lets us forget that was serious, unsettling business for all parties involved. It destroyed the lives of people and remains, in many respects, a sad, curious, and disturbing episode in American history.

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been interested in one way or another in the Salem Witch Trials for a long time, but I recently went to Salem, Massachusetts, for the first time and visited some of the sites most famous and important to the witch trials of 1692, and now it may be an understatement to say that I'm obsessed. I immediately went home and checked out two books on the subject from my local library and requested four more, the first of which being Richard Godbeer's The Salem Witch Hunt.

What an absolutely fascinating and thought-provoking book. Godbeer first provides a very insightful and contextualizing introduction explaining the background and context for the witchcraft hysteria of the late 17th century, and then the entire rest of the book is his transcription of actual documents from the time period, from examinations of the alleged witches to formal indictments to petitions for and against the accused witches by members of their communities. Every one of these documents, spoken or written in the actual words (or close to them) of the people who lived out this injustice and horror of 1692, is an invaluable resources to hear what people's thoughts were at the time, and reading all of this with 331 years of hindsight at my disposal was utterly fascinating. I spent a lot of time speculating and conjecturing why certain people felt certain ways, or why the prevailing attitudes about witchcraft were the way they were, and I know that it's because I'm alive in 2023 that I could pose these thoughts, and that was the absolutely enjoyable part about this book.

My only very small qualm was that I wished Godbeer had provided additional context in between each of the documents, or in between each of the cases he detailed, as the chapters were divided up by each individuals' witchcraft case. The introduction was quite fascinating, and I felt Godbeer could have added so much more context after each document to explain what we just read and why it mattered then and still matters now. However, being able to read these primary sources was incredible helpful to understand what was going on at the time, all on their own without Godbeer's further analysis, so I feel I got a much more thorough glimpse of 1692 Salem. I can go into my next book about the Salem Witch Trials with an incredible increase in understanding of all the events that year and their aftermath.

[Marshall Hess · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction and primary source collection to a profound moment of psychological intrigue in American history. The story of the Salem Witch Hunt casts an eerie illumination on so many modern examples of mob-directed action, tribalized identity, and the power of confirmation bias. I found much in my own world that resonated with sinister tendencies described in the book, whether in church or politics. One of the abiding lessons is the terrifying unpredictability of a group of people who are convinced they are the targets of a conspiratorial, existential attack. That mindset, in Salem of 1692, caused otherwise respectable and cautious people to abandon their systems of self-critique and enagage in a ruthlessly unfair extermination project.
Even more disturbing to me was the way that the Calvinist doctrines of Divine Providence and absolute sovereignty relativized the whole event. In the end, no one can be responsible because God apparently sent the witches to punish them, and then their murdering of innocent people was God's punishment as well. The Puritan society deserves all the respect that history can muster so as not to hang them for views that they could hardly have helped themselves out of. But their concept of God and his work seems to manifest the worst degregation of Christian theology to come through the Western Church. And I assure you, I make this assessment from reading their own words.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is clearly a book a professor might assign his/her students; it is full of detailed information about the history and trials of the Salem witch hunt in 1692. The information and documents are presented in chronological order which help organize the events. It is interesting to read the testimony transcripts and descriptions of the "torture" individuals endured under the spells of the witches. What was more concerning though, was my learning about the torture some individuals went through in order to give a confession, and the body searches given in order to find the "teat" that witches must have hidden somewhere on their body. It is sad that so many innocent people lost their lives and that the community was so harshly affected. Mass hysteria and peer pressure at its "finest" here. :(

[AndrewJP32 bread · Rating 2 out of 5]

Richard Godbeer certainly informs the readers about "The Salem Witch Hunt" of 1692. Godbeer is straight to the point and provides an explanatory overview of the tragedy, then begins to back up his claims with evidence and data. Also, he gives a basic run-down of what happened and why the murders of the accused men and women important. Even though many other theories would say otherwise, the Salem Witch hunt was definitely a trail and error kind of story and Godbeer's analysis was very straight forward and interesting. But, I recommend this book if you were studying the subject not so much trying to understand what happened in Salem, Massachusetts

[Alondra Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books presents a lot of historical evidence about why the Salem Witch trials occurred and although we can’t be sure about what really happened all the theories presented in this book seem to make sense.

[Haley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This text was okay. I do understand the witch trials in a deeper way for having read it, but most of that enrichment was from the documents themselves, not Richard Godbeer's commentary or explanations. I could have just as easily looked up the documents and saved a bit of money.

[Cora Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this for school. I think it would have been a great book if it went from the beginning of the trials to the end, but it skipped around a lot in the middle of the book which made things super confusing.

[Laura Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was full of documents from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. I had a chance to learn and even see things from another point of view. I found the language to be dry, as any 300 year old document would be.

[Catherine McClelland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written with a lots of primary sources. Written for college students but fun for a casual read too

[Ben]

read for HIST1667: Famous American Trials

[Sydney Moore · Rating 1 out of 5]

boring to the point of being irritating

[bina · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sources are very good and are from various people and different types of sources. They show different perspectives and narratives on the witch trials.
Read for a class.

[Adrianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so much diving into this. I feel like I will need to read this through a few more times to digest all of the information (I thought I knew, but didn’t!) 🧙🏼‍♀️

[Jasmine Alvelo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in prep for my trip to Salem but it was very informative regarding the history of the trials. I enjoyed reading about it as a collection of documents from archives

[Care · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Godbeer's analysis on the primary documents included, and the event as as a whole, is where the true value in this book lies. The primary documents are conveniently provided here, but it's the comments made by the author that really changed this from a two star to a four. He takes a fair bit of the ownness of blame off the 'afflicted' and onto the culture and community of New England as a whole.
I'll also comment on the great visual. The cover appears bland at first, especially in photos. But that cover image is done in a rose gold, so reflective and dazzling. Nice job, cover designer.

[Scarlet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Salem Witch Hunt provides a quick and informative overview over the Salem witch trials. The author understands it well to explain the reasons for this witch hunt and the process of it in a way so that also non-academic people will be able to follow his arguments.

If you have just started studying the Salem Witch trials or witch trials in general, definitely have a look at this book. If you're already well-read in this subject, then the book might not offer a lot of new information, but I think that you'll still find the primary sources included in this book highly interesting.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was pretty informative. I liked how it started with a basic run down of what happened, theroies on how and why, then before each section of documents it further explains. The hard to understand- less used now words are defined throughout the text. I learned alot, def. reccomend to someone who wants to understand this better, which I think we should all probably study it so this kind of thing never happens again.

[Natalie Johansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

On one hand, I appreciated this book's brevity: it was, as the title suggests, a brief history of the Salem Trials, comprised mostly of primary documents from the trials. Although the documents were enlightening, I wouldn't have minded more commentary from the author. A more detailed annotation of the documents would have worked, or a more detailed introduction to each set of documents.

[Katinka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has been a great help for me in my school project about puritanism and witch-hunts. The combination of the introduction to the Salem Witch Hunt and Puritanism in general and the first hand sources gives you both a great insight and a background for assignments like mine.

[Patricia Slattery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to read, and a great way to know more of what went on during the trails in Salem. All first encounter, primary documents.