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The inclination of recent scholars has been to portray the people of 17th-century Massachusetts as helpless victims of powerful economic, social, and psychological forces. Many recent accounts cite entrenched sexual hostility, chronic generational conflicts, or the clash of capitalist and peasant ...

The inclination of recent scholars has been to portray the people of 17th-century Massachusetts as helpless victims of powerful economic, social, and psychological forces. Many recent accounts cite entrenched sexual hostility, chronic generational conflicts, or the clash of capitalist and peasant cultures. Rather than seeing the people of Salem Village and the surrounding communities as being swept along by the forces of historical change, Gragg 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.

Few events in American history are as well remembered as the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. But there was another witch hunt that year, in Stamford, Connecticut, that has never been examined in depth. Now Richard Godbeer describes this "other witch hunt" in a concise, fascinating narrative that ...

Few events in American history are as well remembered as the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. But there was another witch hunt that year, in Stamford, Connecticut, that has never been examined in depth. Now Richard Godbeer describes this "other witch hunt" in a concise, fascinating narrative that illuminates the colonial world and shatters the stereotype of early New Englanders as quick to accuse and condemn. That stereotype originates with Salem, which was in many ways unlike other outbreaks of witch-hunting in the region. Drawing on eye-witness testimony, Godbeer tells the story of Kate Branch, a seventeen-year-old afflicted by strange visions and given to blood-chilling wails of pain and fright. Branch accused several women of bewitching her, two of whom were put on trial for witchcraft. The book takes us inside the courtroom--and inside the minds of the surprisingly skeptical Stamford townfolk. Was the pain and screaming due to natural causes, or to supernatural causes? Was Branch simply faking the symptoms? And if she was bewitched, why believe her specific accusations, since her information came from demons who might well be lying? For the judges, Godbeer shows, the trial was a legal thicket. All agreed that witches posed a real and serious threat, but proving witchcraft (an invisible crime) in court was another matter. The court in Salem had become mired in controversy over its use of dubious evidence. In an intriguing passage, Godbeer examines Magistrate Jonathan Selleck's notes on how to determine the guilt of someone accused of witchcraft--an illuminating look at what constituted proof of witchcraft at the time. The stakes were high--if found guilty, the two accused women would be hanged. In the afterword, Godbeer explains how he used the trial evidence to build his narrative, an inside look at the historian's craft that enhances this wonderful account of life in colonial New England.

Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston - and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in ...

Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston - and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation. Albert J. von Frank introduces us to the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave - figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr., the defense attorney; as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott, who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held; and as intriguing as Moncure Conway, the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism, principally that,of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change, exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and others.