The Witches

The Witches reconstructs the Salem witch trials of 1692, when a minister's daughter began having fits during an unusually harsh Massachusetts winter and the resulting panic spread through the colony within weeks. Over less than a year, nineteen men and women were hanged and one eighty-year-old man was pressed to death under stones, as accusations moved from neighbor to neighbor and eventually into prominent families and colonial leadership.

Stacy Schiff, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Cleopatra, works from trial transcripts, sermons, and letters to reconstruct how the crisis built and why it took the shape it did in this particular Puritan community. She pays close attention to the girls and women at the center of the accusations, in a period when women had almost no formal power, and to the ministers and magistrates whose decisions let the trials proceed as far as they did.

It's a dense, heavily sourced work of narrative history rather than a quick primer, aimed at readers who want the full documentary record behind the Salem story.