Syllabus: HSTY2034

Week 3: The Diverse Cultures of Colonial North America

Lecture 1: Settling the Upper South
Lecture 2: Settling New England

Tutorial:   The Salem Witchcraft Trials

Essential Reading:

Documents from David D. Hall, Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England (Course Reader)
Paul Boyer & Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft , pp. 22-36, 80-109.   (Course Reader).
Elizabeth Reis, "The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England." (Course Reader)

Questions:

What do the witchcraft trials reveal about the fears and concerns of Puritan society?   Think about the factors that explain the timing and location of the Salem trials.   What can this episode tell us about the kind of community that existed in this period and place?   How do the trials reflect colonial gender relations?   How do the interpretations offered by Boyer & Nissenbaum and Reis coincide or conflict?

Further Reading: Witchcraft:

Hansen Chadwick, Witchcraft at Salem (New York: G. Braziller, 1969).

John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Richard P. Gildrie, "Visions of Evil: Popular Culture, Puritanism and the Massachusetts Witchcraft Crisis of 1692," Journal of American Culture 8:4 (1985): 17-34.

Philip Gould, "New England Witch-Hunting and the Politics of Reason in the Early Republic," New England Quarterly 68:1 (1995): 58-82.

Larry Gragg, The Salem Witch Crisis (New York, Praeger, 1992).

Peter C. Hoffer, The Devil's Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987).

Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

Richard Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).

Further Reading: British Mainland Colonies

Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001).

Further Reading: Women in the Colonial Era

Carol Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill And Wang, 1996)

Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977).

Mary Beth Norton Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996).

Mary M. Schweitzer, Custom and Contract: Household, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Images and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1658-1750 (New York: Random House, 1991).

Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women Of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Further Reading: Religious Awakenings

Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989).

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity   (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds. Religion in a Revolutionary Age (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994).

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

Optional Assignments

Find out what it would be like to be accused of witchcraft by taking an interactive journey: Salem Witchcraft Hysteria: An Original National Geographic Interactive Feature http://www.nationalgeo graphic.com/features/97/salem/ . Your trial will take approx. ten minutes.

Read Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which opened on Broadway in 1954.   The play is a quick and gripping read that uses a fictionalized version of the Salem witch trials to discuss McCarthyism in 1950s America.   Alternatively, you can rent The Crucible , Hollywood's 1996 rendition of Miller's play starring Da niel Day-Lewis and Wynona Ryder.