Stephen Nissenbaum

Salem-village witchcraft : a documentary record of local conflict in colonial New England

Few episodes in American history have aroused such intense and continued interest as the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials. This volume draws exclusively on primary documents to reveal the underlying conflicts and tensions that caused that small, agricultural settlement to explode with such dramatic force.

Salem Possessed in Retrospect

IT is now forty years after we began planning the experimental history course at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that in turn led to Salem Possessed. We find it an interesting experience to collaborate again as we reflect on that book and its context and on the Salem witchcraft scholarship that has appeared in the intervening decades, including the essays in the present Forum. There is a certain appropriateness in this essay appearing in the William and Mary Quarterly, since our initial plan, when we first envisioned writing about this topic, was to submit an article to this journal. Only gradually did the planned article evolve into a book-length project. So here we are now, both retired, finally writing that long-delayed WMQ essay first envisioned near the beginning of our careers. The experimental history course, which we called “New Approaches to the Study of History,” came first. We jointly introduced it in 1969. (This course, in turn, emerged from the earlier pedagogical experiments of two historians with whom Stephen Nissenbaum had studied as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin: Stanley Katz and William R. Taylor.) Our aim was to engage beginning undergraduates in actual historical research, devoting an entire semester to the intensive study of a single historical episode and for the most part limiting our students to reading raw—uninterpreted—primary sources. We used the Salem witchcraft trials as our episode. As the two of us spent the summer