The Witches: Salem, 1692

The winter of 1692 in Salem, a village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, begins with two girls in the minister's household. Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams suffer strange fits, and the explanation offered is witchcraft. Accusations follow quickly.

Within months the panic spreads well beyond one village. Neighbors name neighbors and husbands name wives. Church members of good standing are accused, along with George Burroughs, a former Salem minister. When the hysteria finally fades, nineteen people have been hanged. Giles Corey has been pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea.

This is narrative history by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stacy Schiff. She works from trial records, sermons and letters to rebuild the Puritan society behind the trials. It is a place of strict faith, political worry and old neighborly grudges. There, spectral evidence is enough to send a woman to the gallows.

Schiff looks closely at the people who drove events: the afflicted girls, the ministers Cotton Mather and Increase Mather, and the judges and magistrates who ran the proceedings. Her question is how a community of otherwise rational people came to believe the devil was walking among them. The book reads as a sober, unsettling reconstruction, and it suits anyone who wants the full context behind a famous catastrophe.