Salem Witch Trials: Library Resources

The story of Tituba, a slave from Barbados, who was one of the first three "witches" to be condemned during the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Written by an author completing a Ph.D. in New England Studies, and whose ancestors had been accused witches in Salem, "The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane" travels seamlessly between the trials in the 1690s and a modern woman's story of mystery and discovery.

Martha Carrier was one of the first women to be accused, tried and hanged as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts. Like her mother, young Sarah Carrier is bright and willful, openly challenging the small, brutal world in which they live. Often at odds with one another, mother and daughter are forced to stand together against the escalating hysteria of the trials and the superstitious tyranny that led to the torture and imprisonment of more than 200 people accused of witchcraft. This is the story of Martha's courageous defiance and ultimate death, as told by the daughter who survived.

In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town's most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.

This riveting historical novel combines the horror of the Salem witch trials with the philosophy and poetry of the nun and writer known as the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this novel takes a mesmerizing look at women in the New World in the 17th century and the stubborn men who accuse them for no reason.

This historical narrative of the Salem witch trials takes its dialogue from actual trial records but applies modern psychiatric knowledge to the witchcraft hysteria. Starkey's sense of drama also vividly recreates the atmosphere of pity and terror that fostered the evil and suffering of this human tragedy.

Featuring five famous trials, this book examines the way our right to a fair trial can be threatened, when people are tempted to abandon their principles in the name of safety. Trials included are the Salem Witch Trials, the Haymarket Affair Trial, the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the trial of Alger Hiss, and the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui--the latter not yet covered extensively in any book.

The inquisitorial apparatus that was first invented in the Middle Ages remained in operation for the next six hundred years, and it has never been wholly dismantled. As we shall see, an unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early thirteenth century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid-twentieth century. Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag; it can be traced through the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

The origins of Puritan belief in witchcraft -- The accusations -- Early interpretations of the Salem witch trials -- Contemporary interpretations of the Salem witchcraft episode -- The impact of the Salem witch trials on later generations.

This fascinating account of the Salem Witch Trials explores their religious, social, and political dimensions, their origins, their critics, and their aftermath, as well as their influence on the American cultural imagination to the present day.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Schiff's recent Cleopatra made 20 Best Books lists in 2010 and has sold 800,000 copies across formats, so what's next? Investigating one raw and awful year in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when a minister's daughter's fits led to barbed accusations of witchcraft. When it was over, 19 men and women had been hanged, which profoundly shaped the emerging republic. With a 300,000-copy first printing.