The Salem Witch Crisis

The Salem Witch Crisis offers a readable narrative of events surrounding the Massachusetts witch trials of 1692. Studies of early American witchcraft in the past two decades have been specialized ones. They demonstrated the possibility that economic conflict, gender and generational hostility, religious divisions, fears of witch cults, and challenges to the legal system sometimes were involved in witchcraft accusations. Collectively, these numerous scholarly monographs and journal articles have both broadened and deepened our understanding of the role of witchcraft beliefs in early America. Unfortunately, there is no single volume that draws upon this impressive body of research and incorporates it into an account of what happened at Salem. Second, the scholarship of the last twenty years has not usually been directed to the general reader; most authors either assume readers are familiar with the events of 1692 or obscure their efforts by resorting to the occasionally impenetrable vocabulary of the social sciences. Gragg provides a synthesis of modern scholarship on the Salem witch trials in a style accessible to the general reader.

The inclination of recent scholars has been to portray the people of seventeenth-century Massachusetts as helpless victims of powerful economic, social, and psychological forces. Many recent accounts depict individuals as being unable to have an impact on events, because of entrenched sexual hostility, chronic generational conflicts, or the clash of capitalist and peasant cultures. Gragg asserts a more traditional interpretation. Rather than seeing the people of Salem Village and the surrounding communities as being swept along by the forces of historical change, he makes a very strong case that the people involved (whether they were clergymen, judges, accusers, or the accused) were active participants, who made decisions that shaped the outcome of events in 1692.