Tag Archives: Witch Trials

September 6, 2011

Back to School

By daseger

It’s back to school week for me, as it has been every single week after Labor Day for my entire life; I went straight from high school to college, undergraduate to graduate, doctorate to full-time professorship. I’ve been really lucky. There is a natural rhythm to my year; I do teach a course or two in the summer, but come September, it’s back full-time. Since it’s time to get a bit more academic, I thought would recommend a few of my favorite books for my ongoing blog and my upcoming semester. First some Salem texts.

As I have stated continuously (and perhaps a bit defensively), I am a historian, but I’m not a Salem historian. I’m not even an American historian; I was trained in early modern European history. So in order to write with some authority about Salem’s history I have to rely on quite a few sources, primary and secondary. Here are my favorites:

First and foremost, Salem: Place, Myth and Memory, edited by Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz. This compilation of essays on many aspects of Salem’s history and culture, edited by my colleagues at Salem State, Dane Morrison and Nancy Schultz, is absolutely invaluable. It includes essays on Salem’s colonial, maritime, and industrial pasts, as well as its architecture, educational legacy, and “witch city” present. If you’re interested in Salem, in either the past or the present, it’s a must-read, must-have book.

One of the contributors to Salem: Place, Myth and Memory, Robert Booth, has very recently published a book on Salem’s commercial peak and decline, Death of an Empire. The Rise and Murderous Fall of Salem, America’s Richest City. I have to admit that I haven’t actually read this book yet (it’s in my bedside stack of must reads, pretty close to the top), but I am recommending it because Salem’s nineteenth-century history (and all of its non-witch trial-related history) simply must be better covered and understood. It’s one of the reasons I started this blog. The subject of the witch trials is definitely in the background of many of the essays in Salem: Place, Myth and Memory, but it is not the primary focus; that ground has been covered too often before. The historiography of the witch trials is vast, and includes such classics and Paul Boyer’s and Steven Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed: the Social Origins of Witchcraft and John Demos’s Entertaining Satan and more recent works like Mary Beth North’s In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. For my part, I like Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 by Bernard Rosenthal, but I think all of the Salem witchcraft texts could benefit from a wider, more comparative focus. This semester I am teaching one of my most popular (and difficult) courses, “Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe”, about witchcraft beliefs and trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the text that I use, Brian Levack’s The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe should also be required reading for anyone seeking to understand what went on in Salem.

I have cited Bryant Tolles’ Architecture in Salem: an Illustrated Guide often when discussing house histories and styles; it’s got a few flaws but is nonetheless absolutely essential for architectural history.

My final recommended Salem book is The Peabody Sisters of Salem by Louise Hall Thorp. There is an updated narrative of the lives of the three Peabody girls (Elizabeth Peabody, Boston bookstore-owner and founder of the American kindergarten movement, Mary Peabody Mann, who married the great educator Horace Mann and shared his work), and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne) by Megan Marshall entitled The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism, but I prefer Thorpe’s older book, which is wonderful at evoking the mid-nineteenth-century world of the sisters. I first read it in high school, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to move to Salem later on.

And now for something completely different. This semester, I’m teaching three courses at Salem State University: World History, our core course for freshmen, the Magic & Witchcraft course, and a graduate course in early modern English history which covers the long period from the Tudors to the American Revolution. My reading list for these courses is long and varied, but here are some of my tried-and-true favorites.

The world history course is very difficult for both myself and the students; after all, it’s the history of the world–a lot of material (we have two world history requirements, the first covers the period to about 1500, the second the later period). One book that I’ve used successfully in this course for several years is Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which helps students grasp early globalization in a very accessible way.

For the Witchcraft course, which covers both the medieval background and the early modern era, in which thousands of people were put on trial for witchcraft and at least 50,000 people executed across Europe (compared to 19 in Salem, one reason why comparative perspective is important), we read and discuss the actual trial records in an ongoing effort to ascertain what was going on. But this is a difficult task, so I also give my students an occasional break by assigned secondary-source “micro-histories” that do the analysis for them: Malcolm Gaskill’s Witchfinders, about the exploits of English “witchfinder-general” Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s, has been a particularly popular book for this purpose, along with James Sharpe’s The Bewitching of Anne Gunter. A Horrible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England.

And finally, two of my favorite books from the long list on my Early Modern England syllabus: Carole Levin’s gender history of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, The Heart and Stomach of a King. Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, and Linda Colley’s cultural history of the construction of a distinct British collective identity, Britons. Forging the Nation, 1707-1837. Both are perfect examples of accessible and academic history.

1 Comment | tags: books, Teaching, Witch Trials | posted in History, Salem

August 31, 2011

Street Art in Salem

By daseger

At the beginning of the Summer, four large metal sculptures were installed on the streets of downtown Salem, the first pieces of a “full public art program” to follow. I wasn’t sure about these sculptures at first (both as works and in situ), but I’ve been watching people, especially children, interact with them for several months, and now I like their presence on the street. The sculptures, by Massachusetts artist Rob Lorenson, will be on Essex and Washington streets until early November.

Unfortunately there is one sculpture downtown that will not be leaving the streets of Salem in November: the Bewitched statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, which was inflicted on the city by the executives of TV Land (with the full cooperation of the city government) in 2005. Not only is it a terrible piece of “art” (just look at the “cloud” pedestal! ) but it demeans Salem’s history and the prominence of its site, Town House Square, which has long been the city’s political and commercial center.

Town House Square in 1906. The Samantha statue is located near the street opening at center left.

In stark contrast to the Samantha statue in terms of taste, historical relevance, and artistic merit is the Witch Trials Memorial installation adjacent to the Charter Street cemetery in downtown Salem, dedicated in August of 1992 by Elie Wiesel in a ceremony that marked the culmination of the year-long commemoration of the Trials’ tercentenary. Designed by artists Maggie Smith and James Cutler, the Memorial features a solemn courtyard enclosed by a stone wall incorporating 20 cantilevered steps, inscribed with the name and date of execution of each victim of 1692. It is always a poignant place to visit, and was all the more so on an absolutely beautiful afternoon with the remnants of Irene strewn about.

2 Comments | tags: Art, Culture, design, Witch Trials | posted in Salem

July 6, 2011

Lady Pepperell and Her House

By daseger

On our way up to York Harbor last week we stopped at one of my very favorite houses, the Lady Pepperell House in Kittery Point. I can’t remember when I first saw this house, but by my teens I was biking over from York to gaze at it and sneak around the grounds. It just seemed so effortlessly elegant and graceful, when compared to both the colonial architecture of York Village and the Victorian cottages of York Harbor. We didn’t have to sneak around this time, as the owner graciously let us walk around the grounds and take some photographs.

Dolphins over the front door!

The house was built in 1760 by the newly-widowed Lady Mary Hirst Pepperell, and its architectural history has already been carefully recounted by The Down East Dilettante. Actually I find myself a bit more interested in the lady than the house at this point in my life, for some reason. Lady Mary appears to have been a woman who was surrounded by very powerful and ambitious men all her life, until the latter part, when she clearly lived life on her own terms. She also had solid Salem connections: her paternal grandfather William Hirst was a prosperous Salem planter and her maternal grandfather, the diarist and Judge Samuel Sewall, was on the bench during the Witch Trials. Her father, Grove Hirst, apparently made a fortune as a Boston merchant, making her a very good catch for her husband, the up-and-coming William Pepperell, also a successful merchant (out of Kittery, then part of Massachusetts) who would go on to reap military and noble honors after he organized and led the New England expedition that captured the French garrison at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745 and became the first colonial Baronet shortly thereafter. And so Mary became a Lady, although many references establish that her privileged Boston background and education had already made her one.

Two of Mary’s and William’s four children died in infancy, prompting her to write the poignant poem A Lamentation &c. On the Death of a Child. Their son Andrew died in early adulthood, leaving only one surviving child, Elizabeth Pepperell Sparhawk. Shortly after Sir William’s appointment as acting Governor of Massachusetts and Lieutenant General in 1759, he too died, leaving Mary a very wealthy widow. She left the older Pepperell family homestead in Kittery to her grandson (who was made heir to the residue of the Pepperell fortune with the condition that abandon the surname of his birth, Sparhawk, for Pepperell) and promptly built her Georgian mansion. When the War of Independence began 15 years later, the conspicuous Tory William Sparhawk Pepperell fled America for Britain (where he was rewarded with a new Baronet title) but his grandmother “weathered the storms of Revolution” at her home. Mary Hirst Pepperell died in 1789, with the New England Gazetteer noting a few years later that her natural and acquired powers were said to be very respectable, and she was much admired for her wit and sweetness of manners.

A few images of Lady Pepperell and her house from Everett Schermerhorn Stackpole’s Old Kittery and her Families (1903), and two early nineteenth-century views of the house from the Detroit Publishing Company (Library of Congress) and Illustrated Memories of Portsmouth, York, York Harbor, York Beach, Kittery, Isles of Shoals, New Castle, and Rye (after 1900):

9 Comments | tags: Architecture, great houses, Photography, Witch Trials | posted in History, Houses

March 3, 2011

A Strange Sales Pitch

By daseger

I’m always on the lookout for unusual Salem-related ephemera, but this roofing advertisement from 1920 really stopped me in my tracks. I think I was looking for something specific, but when I came across this, my search ended. It’s beyond bizarre.

Six years after the Great Salem Fire, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of asbestos roofing shingles released this advertisement in national publications. Let’s leave asbestos off the table, as its danger was unknown at the time. The rest of the ad seems outrageous to me on a number of levels, including the metaphorical connection between Salem witches and roofs (isn’t this a stretch?), the fact that Salem’s falsely-accused “witches” were hanged, not burned, and the sheer egregiousness of exploiting Salem’s TWO greatest tragedies for commercial gain. I think it’s the only text that I’ve ever seen that links these two disastrous, iconic events together.

Other contemporary examples of Johns-Manville’s advertising seem pretty mundane in comparison. There is always a safety theme, which is understandable given the rash of urban fires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Asbestos was the cutting-edge technology that promised security from this threat but ultimately introduced another. Aesthetics is the other appeal (as opposed to fear), as is evident in these other two advertisements from 1920:

Pretty storybook cottages with red roofs! A far cry from that Salem hag-witch. To reinforce its safety image, Johns-Manville (now a division of Berkshire Hathaway) was compelled to include the fire threat in its advertising so we see the spectre of fire, like the fire next door in a 1922 advertisement, but not a specific fire. Ironically, 30 years later the Company produced a special “Salem” shingle, (with a ship slogan rather than a witch!) pictured below.

Leave a comment | tags: advertising, ephemera, Witch Trials | posted in History, Salem

March 1, 2011

The Beginning and After

By daseger

Last week the Boston Globe ran a story about local responses to the unveiling of Salem’s new logo and slogan, “Still making History” (which I addressed in an earlier post), in which a business owner (dispensing witch wares and psychic services) professed his “love” for the slogan, “because 319 years later witches are still here”. So Salem’s falsely-accused “witches”, exonerated by their families’ appeals, the Massachusetts General Court, and a slew of historians, are victimized yet again.

On March 1, 1692 Salem Town magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin began their examinations of three Salem Village women–Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne–accused of witchcraft by a couple of “afflicted” adolescent girls in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris. This was the beginning of the Salem Witch Trials, a topic which I hope to avoid as much and often as possible based on my belief that all too often Salem’s history and identity are exclusively focused on this one event to the exclusion of everything else. I am not a colonial American historian and I have nothing of value to add to the thousands of books that have been written on the Trials. But I do live and work in Salem, and I am writing about Salem, so the topic will not always be easy to avoid. Like today.

It seems to me that there have been too many narratives of the Salem Witch Trials and not enough discussion of their aftermath. I am very happy to report that my colleague at Salem State University, Tad Baker, who is a colonial historian, will offer a corrective interpretation in his forthcoming book A Storm of Witchcraft (due out in 2013 from Oxford University Press). Just a passing glance at the archival record reveals how fervently the families of the 1692 victims sought restitution and the repair of their loved ones’ reputations. This 1710 letter from William Good, husband of Sarah, is a poignant example of what came after. I included a transcription below, as well as an image of the Massachusetts colonial Assembly’s reversal of the witchcraft convictions and a rather bleak view of the snow-covered tercentenary Witch Trial Memorial, taken yesterday.

To the Honourable Committee

The humble representation of William Good of the Damages sustained by him in the year 1692 by reason of the sufferings of his family upon the account of supposed witchcraft. My wife Sarah Good was in prison about 4 months and then executed. A sucking child died in prison before the mother’s execution. A child of 4 or 5 years old in prison 7 or 8 months and being chained in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrified that she hath over time seemed very changeable having little or no reason to govern herself. And I leave it unto the Honourable Court to judge what damages I have sustained by such a destruction of my poor family. And so rest. Your Honours’ Humble Servant William Good. Salem Sept. 13, 1710

Digital Sources for the Salem Witch Trials: the most comprehensive site is the University of Virginia’s Salem Witch Trial Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. Cornell University has both American and European sources in their Witchcraft Collection. The Reversal of Attainder broadside is from the Library of Congress’s Digital Collections.

Leave a comment | tags: advertising, Witch Trials | posted in History, Salem

February 19, 2011

Selling Salem: the Rorschach Test

By daseger

Salem’s new official logo and slogan were unveiled this week at the annual meeting of Destination Salem, the city’s Office of Tourism and Cultural Affairs. For some time–at least decades and probably a century–there has been an ongoing debate and dialogue among Salem officials, business owners and residents over the marketing of the city, with the central contentious issue being how much emphasis should be placed on the witch trials relative to Salem’s other history. It seems to me that the advocates for a witchcraft-focused civic identity won the debate long ago (after all, Salem is “Witch City”; we have witches on our police cars and our high-school sports teams are called witches), yet it continues and the designers of the new logo were apparently trying to craft a bilateral, flexible image. I see only a witch hat, but the (completely unscientific) survey I conducted with my students yielded mixed results: about two-thirds saw the hat, and a third a sail(boat). Quite a few students made the interesting comment that people outside of our region would only see a witch’s hat, because that is the image that they expect to see associated with Salem.

Is it a witch’s hat or a sailboat?

Is it a bat or a butterfly?

6 Comments | tags: advertising, Witch Trials | posted in Salem

January 8, 2011

Witch City, part one

By daseger

This is a topic which I will probably return to again and again—hence the “part one” in the post title. The Witch City to which I refer is not the city of Salem, but rather the image of Salem, which is a different topic altogether, and an important one, I think. My academic specialty is early modern Europe, an era in which tens of thousands of people were executed for witchcraft, but not one of the cities or towns in which trials occurred have transformed themselves into “Witch City”. Yet Salem has clearly done so. Has this been a deliberate development? I’m not sure, but it is certainly one that intensified over the twentieth century.

Did it all start with a spoon? There are many factors which contributed to the making of “Witch City”: the loss of Salem’s commercial hegemony following the Embargo Act of 1807 and the progressive silting up of its harbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s popularity and personal connection to the Witch Trials, the publication of the first interpretive history of the trials by Charles Wentworth Upham in 1867, the increasing popularity of Halloween, and the parallel marketing efforts of Salem’s civic and business leaders. The aggressive marketing of what may be America’s first souvenir spoon, the “Witch Spoon” produced by Daniel Low & Company from 1890, has been the focus of those who have studied this topic and I can see why. Daniel Low, Jewelers and Silversmiths , operated an impressive retail establishment in the former First Church building in Townhouse Square for over a century (1867-1995), but maintained a national presence through the publication of their annual mail-order trade catalogues which prominently featured their witch wares, not only the spoons but also assorted “witch novelties”.

I don’t want to give the impression that it was all about witchcraft merchandise for Daniel Low & Company; they operated a big business and their production both tapped into and reflected national trends and interests. Below is their trade catalogue from 1927, illustrating the Colonial Revival interest in all aspects of pre-revolutionary material culture, as well as a 1902 advertisement for a William McKinley spoon, issued in the immediate aftermath of the president’s assassination in 1901.

Historic New England, Collections Access Database

One way to ascertain Salem’s changing public attitude towards its witch-trial past is to examine guide books and brochures, issued by both private and public entities in increasing numbers from the later nineteenth century. When comparing the Visitors’ Guide to Salem of 1880 to 1915’s What to Do in Salem the trend is clear: the former has a few sentences devoted to the “witchcraft delusion” while the latter sets forth a prioritized list of reasons why Salem possesses such historical importance. At the top is the city’s claim to the title of oldest city in Massachusetts, followed by 2) the “terrible witchcraft craze”, 3) its port and commercial prosperity in the eighteenth century, 4) its “exceptionally active part in the Revolution and War of 1812, 5) Hawthorne, and 6) its colonial architecture. Clearly the success of the Witch Spoon had influenced both the city’s perception and projection of itself.