I n Salem Village, Massachusetts, a widespread moral panic resulted in nearly 200 local residents accused of practicing witchcraft in 1692 and into 1693—and ended in the execution of 20 individuals. Since then, the name Salem has been associated with paranoia, betrayal and religious extremism, and the Salem Witch Trials have served as the inspiration for many books, both fiction and nonfiction.
If you, like so many others, have become fascinated by this bizarre, bitter and ultimately tragic episode in American history , you may be interested in the books about the Salem Witch Trials that we have highlighted below—many of which have been recommended to us by our expert interviewees. If you are completely new to the subject, we suggest starting with this straight-forward Smithsonian summary article before moving on to the book-length histories. If you are visiting Massachusetts, you may also be interested in visiting the Salem Witch Museum , which is open year-round.
This 2015 book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacey Schiff is the most recent major publication on the subject of the Salem Witch Trials. To produce it, Schiff delved deep into the archives and reconstructs events as closely as possible, bringing a fresh eye and compelling writing style. "Her research is impeccable;" declared the New York Review of Books, " no previous writer has scoured the documentary record to such great depth . Moreover, she has mastered the entire history of early New England.... This enables her to provide deep, richly textured background for specific moments and situations." At once a painstakingly detailed history and a thrilling narrative, The Witches: Salem, 1692 offers the obvious place to start for the interested general reader.
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The Salem Witch Trials are explored in detail as part of Oxford University Press's series Pivotal Moments in American History. The author, Emerson 'Tad' Baker II is an archaeologist and history professor at Salem State University who has worked extensively on witchcraft in colonial-era America. Baker sees the Salem trials as a phenomenon arising from a 'perfect storm' of cultural and historical factors, and marked a turning point as American society was beginning to move on from its founding Puritan principles.
As Malcolm Gaskill—the renowned English historian and bestselling author of The Ruin of All Witches —
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First released in 1969, Witchcraft at Salem was one of the first of a new wave of scholarly books on the subject of the Salem Witch Trials. Chadwick Hansen, then a professor at the University of Illinois, offered a reappraisal of the prevailing assumption that those executed were victims of a mass hysteria, arguing that witchcraft was widely practiced in 1690s Salem, and that—according to the culture of the time—"there was every reason to regard [this alleged witchcraft] as a criminal offense."
Richard Trask, historian and town archivist for Danvers (the Massachusetts town formerly known as Salem Village), told Five Books that Chadwick's book "was and is filled with original insights. I believe it a pioneering work."
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Arthur Miller's extraordinary 1953 stageplay re-presents or reimagines the events of Salem in 1692 in the context of the McCarthy-era anti-communist campaign in the United States. More than forty years later, Miller explained in The New Yorker that writing The Crucible had been " an act of desperation... The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal." It is now regarded as a great classic of American playwriting.
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“Some readers—especially New Englanders—will know Tituba from The Crucible . Tituba was a Bajan figure, an enslaved woman who appears in dotted lines in the archive of the Salem witch trials, as a vector of unreason or irrationalism, of Voodoo practices or alternative medicine. This is a beautiful historical novel that takes up archival gaps, the spaces between what we can and can’t know about historical figures, particularly those that weren’t from white wealthy families. She does a kind of imaginative reanimation of the figure of Tituba and explores deeply the power that this figure held.” Read more...
The Best Postcolonial Literature
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb ,
Literary Scholar
ed. Bernard Rosenthal
All writing on the subject of the Salem Witch Trials is, inevitably, drawn from a certain interpretation of known facts. If you prefer to stick to the primary evidence, you may be interested in this reference book which reproduces all known legal documents dating from the trials, presented in chronological order. It was produced with the support of the United States' National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and offers helpful transcriptions of difficult-to-read text.
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