The Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692 Essay examples -- The Crucible Art

The Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692 The Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, which resulted in 19 executions, and 150 accusations of witchcraft, are one of the historical events almost everyone has heard of. They began when three young girls, Betty Parris, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam began to have hysterical fits, after being discovered engaging in forbidden fortune-telling (not dancing naked in the woods) to learn what sorts of men they would marry. Betty's father, the Reverend Samuel Parris, called in more senior authorities to determine if the girls' affliction was caused by witchcraft. Although Betty was sent away fairly soon, and did not participate in the trials, the other girls were joined by other young and mature women in staging public demonstrations of their affliction when in the presence of accused "witches." The events in Salem have been used as a theme in many literary works, including the play by Arthur Miller which we are going to read during this unit. They are interesting to anthropologists because they display some of the characteristics of "village" witchcraft and some of the features of the European witch craze. Many commentators have seen the Salem witch craze as the last outbreak of the European witch craze, transported to North America. As in African and New Guinea villages, the original accusations in Salem were made against people who, in one way or another, the accusers had reason to fear or resent. Moreover, the first few of the accused fit the definition of "marginal" persons, likely to arouse suspicion. However, as in Europe, the accusations spread, and came to encompass people not involved in any of Salem's local grudges. As in Europe there was a belief that the accused were in league with the Devil and "experts" employed "scientific" ways of diagnosing witchcraft. Interestingly, during the colonial period in Africa, shortly after World War II, there were a number of witch finding movements in Africa, which resembled the Salem episode in some ways, and had a similar status "in between" the sort of witch hunt found in Europe and the typical African pattern. Typically, in these movements, "witch finders" would come in from outside a village and claim to be able to rid the village of witchcraft. At this period there was great dislocation, with people moving around because of government employment, a... ...er trusted them. This was likely to be a more acute problem in the U.S., since the people who were named by those who cooperated with the Committee weren't hanged and put out of the way, just fired and left to try to lead the resistance to McCarthyism. Namers of names sometimes found themselves with no friends at all, since anti-Communists often still failed to trust them. The issue of resisting collaboration with the witch hunters was important enough to Miller that he altered history, and portrayed the trials as stopping when more people refused to confess when, in fact, a significant increase in confessions probably served to cast some doubt on the validity of individual confessions. Taking liberties with the text is one of the characteristics of the interaction between humans and their myths. And a charter myth is certainly what the witch hunts in Europe and Salem have become, though they have more basis in fact than most myths. The stories of the witch hunts are charter myths for our time, to be told by feminists, left-wing intellectuals, and lawyers for President Clinton, each taking what he or she needs from the story, adding or subtracting as seems fit.