The Witches: Salem, 1692

Parts enthralling, parts cumbersome. Schiff dazzles, and then she overwhelms. Sometimes it's quite exasperating. She throws around countless references - without further elaboration on the meaning. And then is overly detailed about the dozens of people who it is hard to keep track of. Yet ...Schiff recreates the times of the Salem Witch Trials in a way that makes you feel that you are there and you feel close to understanding them as a people from our American past. And while she can be tedious some of her many details are welcome (if only she toned it down a bit!) She even brings wit and playfulness to a historical period of Puritan seriousness and such an era of violence, fear and hardship. So many in Salem were swept up by the show more hysteria that they were afraid to speak out lest they be accused. The modern phrase witch hunt conjures these feelings. Schiff's context weaves together the history in such a way that the history feels ever-present and real. She retells the stories from all sides. The magistrates and ministers bear the most responsibility for enabling these baseless claims and for not providing fair trials- favoring the accusers who were almost always teenagers. They fanned the flames of hysteria to perpetuate their own unchecked fanaticism.

The Witch Trials is still one of the most important lessons in American history. For we as a people are not as far removed from the Salem villagers as we may like to see ourselves. show less

Ms. Eliza Foss' narration enhanced Ms. Stacy Schiff's excellent The Witches : Salem, 1692. Time didn't hang while listening to its fifteen compact discs. It's not as if I haven't read about the Salem Witchcraft trials before in books I own. In fact, that's why I checked this book out from my local library.

I very much enjoyed the more recent information Ms. Schiff provided, although I wish she had checked out the Miss Gulch footage posted on YouTube in 2010 or watched a copy of the MGM 'The Wizard of Oz' movie before she wrote what she did about Aunt Em and Miss Gulch. As shown here, it's not Miss Gulch's wealth that prevents Aunt Em from telling her what she thinks of her. Aunt Em is held in check by her Christianity -- either because show more her opinion would be best expressed in foul language or that opinion is too far from the principle of Christian love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AldxVQ8z5FQ

The section on the questioning and death of Giles Corey was particularly interesting because it contradicted something I had believed about him.

If you suffer from hypertension, be sure to take your blood pressure medication before listening. The behavior of the 'justices' (I get a bad taste in my mouth just typing that word for those men) is absolutely appalling! I found myself indulging in a fantasy of letting them know what their future reputations would be based upon their judicial murders of 19 persons. Another fantasy was if I had the telepathic and telekinetic powers of Jean Grey of the X-Men, I would have used them to make the girls accuse the justices, particularly, their chief, William Stoughton. I wonder how long the trials would have gone on then.

It was frightening how even being a person of good reputation couldn't save one from accusation. George Burroughs was a minister and he still hanged. This was definitely a situation where one was presumed guilty and left in a disgusting jail, manacled, for months while awaiting trial -- not to mention having to pay the costs of your imprisonment. You could also expect to have your possessions confiscated if you were convicted -- even if that left your children to starve.

The extent to which Salem tried to cover up their evil hysteria afterward made me angry, too.

To repeat, this is absorbing history, but you might want to watch some comedy every few CDs to calm you down. There's also a lesson to be taken from what learned and intelligent persons 'prove' using logic because their logic is influenced by their beliefs. (That cuts both ways, theists and atheists.)

I heartily recommend this book to persons interested in the Salem Witch Trials, American history, or examples of miscarriages of justice. show less

Stacy Schiff attempts to set the record straight on the witch hysteria of 1692, something that has been defined for modern people by how it is depicted in movies, plays, and books. This is partially due to the efforts of those who lived through the crisis to erase the witch madness from the collective memory (for example, noted diarists of the period have blank spaces for the 9 months of the trials). Schiff relies on the official court transcripts for much of her narrative providing a relentless account of accusations, denials, questionable judicial practices, confessions, and further accusations. The repetition of the process would be tedious if it weren't so terrifying. The psychological effects of the hysteria are laid clear in show more written accounts of the accused who actually came to believe that they may in fact be witches. Over the course of time the crisis spirals out of Salem Village to Andover and Boston and threatens to undermine the economy and government of New England.
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. show less

A thorough and thoroughly interesting look at the Salem witch trials and the possible motives behind the frenzied turns it took. It's well-written and just as nicely researched. Recommended, if you're looking to read about the event, this is a great option.

While there's a lot out there about the Salem witch trials, so much of it has been layered over with myth and confusion. As the author herself points out, there's very little by way of first-person eyewitness accounts of 1692 in Salem, as if the whole town collectively decided to erase the history. This thoroughly researched account takes you through 1692 from January when the strange behavior of a couple of girls and accusations first began, through the summer of trials and hangings, and the fall when the tide began to turn once again.

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 show more 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. show less

It felt like this book would never end.



I like nonfiction, I love historical nonfiction. I also love details. Give me lots and lots of details and send me hopping down the rabbit hole on a research adventure and I'm a happy girl.

What I don't like is constant repetition of said details and nearly obsessive reiteration of scant sources that makes their scantiness blazingly obvious. I also don't want to hear over and over again how little there was to work with. I think it was primarily this last bit that grated so much about Schiff's writing. It came off as a college student's haphazardly cobbled together thesis with some passive remarks tossed in as if Schiff felt coerced into writing rather than any desire to expound upon its show more historical importance, cultural ramifications, reasons, or, at the very least, personal perspectives on available explanations floating around in the void. Such as the tensions brought to the fore by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum in Salem Possessed. Or any number of later authors that have worked on cracking the surrounding membrane of Salem and its trials.

During the first two chapters I found myself debating the validity of never quitting on a book; I just couldn't get into Schiff's writing style. It seemed so jumbled and wordy. By the third chapter things started looking up and I began to enjoy bits. Unfortunately I found the book drifting back into the jumbled territory of the first two chapters more and more as it progressed.

I haven't read anything by Schiff before so I don't consider myself adequately versed in her writing style. I was wary of this work because I saw it had quite a lot of poor to flat out awful reviews but I had also seen so many great reviews on her Cleopatra project. So I figured it was just the weight of the detailing that put people off Witches and, as mentioned before, details make me a happy girl, so how bad could it be?



It was bad. For the most part, bad.

Schiff sets the scene pretty well for our foray into the depths of 1692 Salem and the political unrest engulfing it. She also pries out a great amount of character study, suppositional character study to be taken with a pinch of salt but a large amount nonetheless.

It's the delivery that kept falling flat for me. It was pandering, stuttering, anachronistic, and often offensive. (An indigenous warrior as "the swarthy terrorist in the backyard," really?) It felt as if Schiff was more than happy to slip in and out of dramatic biographical ramblings instead of "keeping the plot" and giving us anything fresh on Salem and its people. Making it seem much more risible than relevant in the whole. show less

I couldn’t put this one down. Not like a typical scholarly work. Informative, yes. But you feel as though you’re being told the story as if you’re there, not just reading an account of what transpired all those years ago.

Now, I knew people had some crazy views back then, but putting yourself into the contextual setting of these people really made me take a step back and try to empathize with them. Why would young women say they were possessed or were witches doing satan’s bidding? Why would you confess, even when you know it means prison and/or death? One entry hit the nail on the head I think, stating that “if I denied a thousand times, he would never believe me, if I confess once, he will stop the trial”. And the fact that show more Cotton Mathers moved on to inoculation. I don’t know how I never read (or maybe I did and just didn’t retain it) that.

Overall, my favorite historical account so far due to how immersive it was. What an absolutely insane, hysteria, terror filled time in our history. show less