Submitted by: Submitted by gendavidl
Views: 489
Words: 480
Pages: 2
Category: US History
Date Submitted: 06/22/2012 12:47 PM
David Lewis
Period. 2
Salem Witch Trials
The Salem witch trials were a series of religion crazed hearings and prosecutions
of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and
May 1693. Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary
hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the province. From June
through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of
witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging.
Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to
submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of
witchcraft. Dozens sat in jail for months without trials.
A "witchcraft craze" rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the
1600s. Tens of thousands of supposed witches—mostly women—were executed. Though
the Salem trials came on just as the European craze was winding down, local
circumstances explain their onset. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that
swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended. 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.
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. Another girl, Ann Putnam, age 11, experienced similar episodes. 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...