Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem
witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched,
and utterly riveting study.
In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not
solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks
had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many
traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had
fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders,
defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered
how God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck
by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and
what the witchcraft “victims” described, many were quick to see a
vast conspiracy of the Devil in league with the French and the
Indians threatening New England on all sides. By providing this
essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well
beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one
of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our
history.
關於作者:
Mary Beth Norton is Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American
History at Cornell University. She is the author of The
British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England,
1774—1789 1972; Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary
Experience of American Women, 1750—1800 1980;
Founding Mothers Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming
of American Society 1996, which was a Pulitzer Prize
finalist; and with five others A People and a Nation 6th
ed., 2001. She has also edited several works on women’s history
and served as the general editor of The AHA Guide to Historical
Literature 3rd ed., 1995.