A young woman is led to her execution during the Salem witchcraft trials.Īll three women were brought before the local magistrates and interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, 1692. On February 29, under pressure from magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, the girls blamed three women for afflicting them: Tituba, the Parris' Caribbean slave Sarah Good, a homeless beggar and Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished woman. Another girl, Ann Putnam, age 11, experienced similar episodes. In January of 1692, Reverend Parris' daughter Elizabeth, age 9, and niece Abigail Williams, age 11, started having "fits." They screamed, threw things, uttered peculiar sounds and contorted themselves into strange positions, and a local doctor blamed the supernatural. The Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the Devil. Controversy also brewed over Reverend Samuel Parris, who became Salem Village's first ordained minister in 1689, and was disliked because of his rigid ways and greedy nature. This aggravated the existing rivalry between families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem and those who still depended on agriculture. The displaced people created a strain on Salem's resources. 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. Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials (Salem Village is present-day Danvers, Massachusetts colonial Salem Town became what's now Salem.) Known as King William's War to colonists, it ravaged regions of upstate New York, Nova Scotia and Quebec, sending refugees into the county of Essex and, specifically, Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1689, English rulers William and Mary started a war with France in the American colonies. Though the Salem trials came on just as the European craze was winding down, local circumstances explain their onset. Tens of thousands of supposed witches-mostly women-were executed. A "witchcraft craze" rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. Several centuries ago, many practicing Christians, and those of other religions, had a strong belief that the Devil could give certain people known as witches the power to harm others in return for their loyalty. Since then, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice, and it continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft-the Devil's magic-and 20 were executed. The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 16.
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