Word: salem
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...Salem Possessed advances a different view of the Salem witch trials. Instead of relying on alluringly lurid depositions about accused witches's diabolic practices or heroic self-defense and their accusers' sufferings or reprehensible motives, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum base most of their case on ordinary town records of ordinary villagers in ordinary times--tax records and records of people's opinions of Parris and the two ministers who preceeded...
VIEWED FROM THE 1950s, the Salem witch trials seemed a liberal's nightmare: a classic instance of arbitrary persecution by meddlers and busybodies, like the busybodies who accused obviously innocent reformers of trying to subvert the American republic. Arthur Miller's The Crucible gave this perspective its most eloquent convincing and popular expression, dramatically pitting John Proctor, the skeptical but self-respecting hero who would not save his life by making a false confession, against people like the Reverend Samuel Parris, who "believed he was being persecuted wherever he went," cutting a "villainous" and bloodstained path into the history books...
With the help of maps comparing the households which supported Parris in his battle for a higher salary, with the households whose members denounced their neighbors as witches in 1692, Boyer and Nissenbaum root their account of Salem's trials not in individual villainy and heroism, but in social changes important all over New England. In other words, they believe the Salem witch trials meant something, that the trials grew out of genuinely important conflicts, not an early instance of man's rationally inexplicable inhumanity to his fellow...
Boyer and Nissenbaum trace the efforts of Salem Village--an extension of Salem peopled mainly by farmers who led their lives in time-honored ways--to win independence from an increasingly maritime and commercial Salem Town. The two authors interpret the support given both Parris and the witch trials by the Village's well-to-do but socially immobile farmers as an expression of deep-seated, complex anxieties provoked by the increasingly individualistic and commercialistic outlook of the townspeople who had hired Parris. Traditional patterns of order and hierarchy throughout New England were giving way to what would become 18th...
...constituency comprises some 475,000 people. The sixth stretches the length of the rugged North Shore; from the decaying industrial city of Lynn, to historic Salem, through the affluent one-time Yankee enclaves of Beverly Farms and Marblehead, to Gloucester where the shrinking fishing industry clamors for protective trade legislation...