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It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an 80-year-old man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, THE WITCHES is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story-the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.… (more)
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Still, it's not her scholarship that turned me off as much as her choices in how to present the material she had to work with. The first three-quarters or more of the book is written as if the accusations were true — she recounts women flying on broomsticks, Satanic baptisms, specters tormenting people while their physical bodies were miles away, and other wild accounts with a straight face and no attempt to explain or put them in context. By the time she finally gets around to examining how the three young girls who started the entire nightmare with their accusations might have come to be afflicted with hysteria, it was too late to redeem the book for me. In my opinion the account would have worked much better if she had interwoven the accusations and the scientific explanations of the phenomena more tightly.
As far as I can tell, Schiff did her homework and presents as much information as is available. She also is very clear not only about what we know, but what we don't know, which I appreciated. Not everyone will find her stylistic choices as off-putting as I did, so if you have an interest in the topic you might well find this book worth your while.
The author definitely did her research. She goes in depth on many aspects of Puritan society and the history of the colonies, witch trials, and the superstitions of the Puritan brand of religion. At times, the author's research seems to veer away from the witch trials themselves, but everything ultimately gives background and depth to the trials themselves and the ladies involved.
Ultimately, I got what I wanted out of this volume. I learned the intimate details of the lives of the accused, their accusers, and their judges. I learned little known aspects of this well known historical event such as the different type of accusers and how closely families stuck together or how quickly they fell apart under the burden of suspicion and death. However, beyond the wealth of information and the joy of learning such, this book suffers from many flaws.
The author tends to get wordy, she'll use five words were one will do. I am not sure if she was aiming for readability, to make the work more relatable to the common reader rather than just scholars. If so, her plan backfired. The reader can get bogged down in so many words that the general point of the paragraph, page, or chapter gets lost.The author's tendency to wander also doesn't help with this.
The author tends to wander from subject to subject, on one societal aspect to another randomly. She'll go in depth about a particular person's witch trial; then three paragraphs later, she'll talk about the superstitions of Puritan society or the history of its ministers. There are some stretches to this work where you could have five or six subjects crammed onto one page, varying from paragraph to paragraph. Some consistences from chapter to chapter would've helped this book.
There are also narrative issues. Many of the trial scenes, and I stress the word SCENE, read as fictional rather than nonfiction. Now in and of itself, this aspect wouldn't be as glaring if the author used the same narrative style for the rest of the book. However, she does not. So the trial scenes are glaring in there scene setting rather than flowing with the rest of the work.
At the end of the day, I got what I wanted out of this work. I learned more about a seminal event in American history and intimate details of those involved. I only wish, however, that the author had paid as much attention to the nitty-gritty details of writing as she did to the historical facts presented. Formatting is screwy, words pile up on top of each other, and a wandering narrative drag this nonfictional work down. Would I seek this work out again? Maybe if I had a specific question on a party involved with the witch trials. I would not, however, seek to read this work again for pleasure.
Note: Book was received for free from the publisher via a Goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review.
Unfortunately the book sinks under the weight of too much information. In too many places the book reads like a dull research paper. While not a terrible book, there are other, better ones on the Salem trials.
Living in Danvers, MA the former Olde Salem Village, one is attuned to the history of the area especially when the trials are involved. Rebecca Nurse's, one of the citizens hung as a witch, homestead is a popular tourist spot and the site of a PBS special. The three hundred anniversary of the trial, a memorial was placed on the spot near the Meetinghouse where Samuel Parris preached is rhetoric.
The book does explain how this stain on the history of Danvers happened. The Puritan religion and the Essex Country politics were the main reason.
Her bibliography draws upon the major sources, from Hansen to Demos, Norton to Karlesn, as well as Boyer and Nissenbaum. Fortunately, Schiff does not draw upon the work of Linnda Caporael and her disproven ergotism hypothesis. While touches of each of the major historians' work may be found in Schiff's writing, especially the factionalism described by Boyer and Nissenbaum, Schiff reserves her own hypothesis for the end, though it closely resembles that of Hansen. Schiff writes, "What they [the afflicted] developed sound to have been a form of emotional laryngitis; a sense of suffocation tends to accompany hysteria" (p. 387). Adapting Hansen's hysteria hypothesis to modern psychological terms, Schiff blames the initial outbreak on conversion disorder, "the body literally translating emotions into symptoms" (p. 386). From there, Schiff argues, the girls effectively used their symptoms to gain attention they never would have received in Puritan New England. Schiff concludes her narrative with an examination of similar outbreaks of hysteria in the United States in the centuries following Salem, from anti-illuminists to McCarthyism to the Starr Report.
Schiff's work is its usual high quality and her efforts to synthesize a coherent narrative out of the conflicting (or missing) period records as well as the work of various historians pays off, though her return to Hansen's hysteria hypothesis seems a bit simplistic, while her use of Freud further demonstrates historians' blind spot regarding modern psychology. Her conclusion, in which she explores the continued appeal of Salem and the occurrence of similar events in American history, offers more insight than others have written on the subject. In all, Schiff contributes to the historical dialogue of Salem while making that history more accessible to non-historians.
Schiff's account is detailed and evenhanded. By turns fascinating and tragic - especially stories my like own relative, Rebecca Nurse, who was an old woman and mostly deaf and so pious that most likely her excommunication was the most difficult part of the whole proceedings - most of the time the pages turn quickly, though there are a few times when the narrative gets bogged down by the very fact of how complicated piecing together what happened in chronological order can get and introducing all the main players. I had to look back at the list at the beginning more than once to remember who was who, accuser or accusee, and how one person was related to another. The bulk of the narrative simply takes you through the chronology of events, only at the end trying to make sense of what may have caused the girls to behave or accuse the way they did. I learned a lot and would love to learn more.
That hysteria can take over a whole town is not unusual. That wasn't the first time it
Much of the documentation of that time has been destroyed or was not truthfully recorded. Despite that, Schiff has put together the information into a comprehensive telling of the story that kept me interested throughout.
I listened to an unabridged audio version. There is an accompanying e-book that I was not able to download, so I didn't have the cast of characters that is apparently at the beginning of the print book. That meant I had to listen carefully to keep the characters straight. A reading challenge, but not onerous.
The narrator was occasionally snarky in her reading, not unwarranted. I minor kibble is that at the end of the book, the added music was too loud and overwhelmed the words still being read. I can do without the music added to too many audio books. For me, it really does nothing to enhance the story, and instead is distracting.
Her analogies comparing things to certain pop culture items like Harry Potter and the Wizard of Oz are made, I believe, to lighten heavy historical facts.
With that said I think it was an interesting read and worth it.
Schiff does a great job of establishing the context of the witch trials, with the understanding of witchcraft and previous crises including a dramatically large one in Sweden in 1675. Other events of the time that had an effect on the New Englander's psyche was the recent King Phillip's War (and continuing scuffles with natives and French settlers on the frontiers) and the revolt against New England royal governor Edmund Andros in 1689. The adoption of a new charter for the province and the arrival of a new governor for Massachusetts are events happening concurrently with the witch trials. Closer to home, Schiff examines the relationships of the residents of Salem Village. It's pretty clear that if you lived in Salem Village in 1692, you had some asshole neighbors, and the resentments informed the underlying tensions related to the witchcraft accusations. In the final chapters, Schiff also examines some theories behind why the witchcraft hysteria occurred, especially the psychology of the "afflicted" girls who's accusations were the tipping point. It's an interesting and accessible history of a horrendous atrocity and miscarriage of justice in American history.
A decent enough look into the events that happened in Salem, MA. You really get a feel for how strange the Puritanical culture was living on the edge of the wilderness of America. It really feels like a strange conflict-ion of the last moments of the Dark Ages with the beginnings of
A note on the audio: the reader was atrocious, particularly in the beginning. While I know Schiff's writing has a degree of sarcasm in the tone (which itself is annoying), the narrator added her own degree of irritation that took several discs to get used to (or she toned it down). Thumbs down on that.
The Witches Salem, 1692, is a retelling of a uniquely American blend of religion and paranoia, “a little story that becomes a big one, much more than our national campfire
The trials began when a number of Salem Village girls claimed to be tormented by the devil and accused local men and women of being wizards and witches. The people of Salem Village lived in isolation threatened by attacks from native American tribes, they had had their charter revoked and were in economic conflict with nearby Salem Town. There was an deeply inbred fear of strangers coupled with a resentment within the village habitants, towards each other.
By summer the Salem jail had filled with witches of both genders and all ages, from a toddler to a grandmother. The hysteria radiated outward, snaring other communities, such as Andover and Ipswich.
What I found distressing about the account of the witch trials was that highly educated (for their time) men were so readily willing to accept highly contradicting and fanciful "tales" of adolescent girls. But as has been seen in modern times such "witch trials" can occur regardless of how "advanced" we think we have become.
I really enjoyed this book. It's full of information, maybe a little to much for some, but I love having as many facts as I can about something I find incredibly interesting.
As Schiff moves into the trials and convictions, her narrative does slow down, and its language tightens beneath an excess of detail , but Schiff regains her stride in the book’s conclusion, where she analyzes the trials’ aftermath, and gives a ”what became of them" account of some of the principal people involved in the trials.
In any case this is a great read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the Salem 1692 events.
Library copy
The main negative I had was that it seemed meandering at times, like it needed a little more focus. But that could be due to me listening to it in 15-minute increments. It could more focused on the page. Overall, a very interesting read. I also liked that when the narrator, Eliza Foss, was reading direct quotes, she would alter her voice a little for us to keep track of each person speaking.