Salem Witch Trails Fact

I would recommend reading or watching “The Crucible” if your interested in this. The author did his research extensively for the story, and it explains it really well. He mentions the only thing he changes is one of the characters ages, from 13 to 17 (for good reason).

Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory for the McCarthyism at the time he wrote the Crucible. The majority of the people executed were elderly. The first woman to be hung was 60 years old, the last was a 71-year old man who was pressed to death.

I’ve attached several links below. I’m from that area and I am related to Sarah Good.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/

https://salemwitchmuseum.com/history-education

http://historyofmassachusetts.org/salem-witch-trials-victims/

https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/witch.htm

You might enjoy the Aaron Mahnke podcast Unobscured, this seasons [first season technically] is all about the Salem trials, he interviews experts and goes into the society and history of the area before the trials.

As for the trials themselves, I've read a number of books and watched several documentaries so I know it's a little more complicated than 'girls go mad with power' but I quite like the theory that it was a poor grain harvest, and the hallucinations were the result of this bactera that grows on damp grain. But, overall, it was a number of social factors that snowballed. And despite what some claim, the only 'witch' was maybe the slave Tituba, who was possibly doing some form of folk magick [and who may of been actually native] as well as this other man [name escapes me] who had a knowledge of herbal remedies. Everything else was basically one family vs. another family, undesirable members, and religious piety [there was two churches, one was slightly less lenient]