Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
10 best books like Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Paul S. Boyer): Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750, The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, The Origins of American Politics, The Salem Witch Trials Reader, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
| Author | Kathleen M. Brown |
| ISBN | 0807846236 |
Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia....
| Author | Marilynne K. Roach |
| ISBN | 1589791320 |
Based on twenty-seven years of original archival research, including the discovery of previously unknown documents, this day-by-day narrative of the hysteria that swept through Salem Village in 1692 and 1693 reveals new connections behind the events, and shows how rapidly a community can descend...
Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750
| Author | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich |
| ISBN | 0679732578 |
This enthralling work of scholarship strips away those abstractions to reveal the hidden -- and not always stoic -- face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages we encounter the awesome burdens -- and the considerable power -- of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her...
The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries
| Author | Carlo Ginzburg |
| ISBN | 0801843863 |
Based on research in the Inquisitorial archives, the book recounts the story of a peasant fertility cult centred on the benandanti. These men and women regarded themselves as professional anti-witches, who (in dream-like states) apparently fought ritual battles against witches and wizards, to...
The Origins of American Politics
| Author | Bernard Bailyn |
| ISBN | 0394708652 |
The Charles K. Colver Lectures, Brown University 1965.
"An astonishing range of reading in contemporary tracts and modern authorities is manifest, and many aspects of British and colonial affairs are illuminated. As a political analysis this very important contribution will be hard to refute...."
—Frederick...
Against the backdrop of a Puritan theocracy threatened by change, in a population terrified not only of eternal damnation but of the earthly dangers of Indian massacres and recurrent smallpox epidemics, a small group of girls denounces a black slave and others as worshipers of Satan. Within two years,...
| Author | Christine Leigh Heyrman |
Revealing a surprising paradox at the heart of America's "Bible Belt," Christine Leigh Heyrman examines how the conservative religious traditions so strongly associated with the South evolved out of an evangelical Protestantism that began with very different social and political attitudes....
| Author | Mary Beth Norton |
| ISBN | 0375706909 |
Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study.
In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian...
Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience
| Author | Richard Francis |
| ISBN | 0007163622 |
The Salem witch hunt of 1692 has entered our vocabulary as the very essence of injustice. Biographer and novelist Richard Francis looks at the familiar drama with fresh eyes, grasping the true significance of this cataclysm through the personal story of Samuel Sewall, New England Puritan, Salem trial...
| Author | Richard White |
| ISBN | 0521424607 |
An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations – stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans...
| Author | Peter H. Wood |
| ISBN | 0393314820 |
File under: books that everyone interested in Colonial America needs to read. This is one of those rare books that actually managed to hit hard enough to break through a little into the basic story of American history that high school students are getting. One of Wood's main arguments here is that planters...
| Author | Linda K. Kerber |
| ISBN | 0807846325 |
Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers,...
| Author | Robin Briggs |
| ISBN | 0140144382 |
Witches and Neighbors is a remarkable interpretation of the course and causes of the fear and persecution of witches that bedeviled Europe for centuries. Robin Briggs draws on the latest research into the local realities underlying the phenomenon. In particular, he employs his own extensive work...
Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall
| Author | Eve LaPlante |
| ISBN | 0060786612 |
In 1692 Puritan Samuel Sewall sent twenty people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts represent a low point of American history, made famous in works by Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges), and...
The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials
| Author | Marion L. Starkey |
| ISBN | 0385035098 |
In truth, this book is a near-failure.
Historically it sucks, and it reeks of the sense of postmodern superiority often found in books written by social scientists.
Apparently, Ms. Starkey "...applies modern psychiatric knowledge to the witchcraft hysteria," yet that psychiatric element...
Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
| Author | Elizabeth Reis |
| ISBN | 0801486114 |
In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft...
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
| Author | John Putnam Demos |
| ISBN | 0195033787 |
Possibly my favorite thing about this book is Demos's confession, in his preface, that he discovered in the course of researching this book that, yes, he is descended from those Putnams. But this is because trivia and the malice of serendipity fascinate and delight me.
This is an excellent,...
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
| Author | Carol F. Karlsen |
| ISBN | 0393317595 |
Confessing to "familiarity with the devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. The case of Ann Cole, who was "taken with very strange Fits," fueled an outbreak of witchcraft...
Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692
| Author | Richard Godbeer |
| ISBN | 0195161300 |
The Salem witch hunt of 1692 is among the most infamous events in early American history; however, it was not the only such episode to occur in New England that year. Escaping Salem reconstructs the "other witch hunt" of 1692 that took place in Stamford, Connecticut. Concise and accessible, the book...
| Author | Chadwick Hansen |
| ISBN | 0807611379 |
This book is very dated, sometimes horrifically so*, but it has a couple of very valuable points to make. Hansen describes specifically and at length the correlations between the afflicted girls of Salem and the nineteenth century hysterics of Charcot and Janet; while his use of the diagnosis of hysteria...
The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe
This famous book focuses on the great age of witch-hunting in Europe (and colonial America) between 1450 and 1750. It examines why the witch-trials took place; how many trials and victims there were, and where; why their incidence was so uneven in Europe; who accused whom; and why witch-hunting eventually...
The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America
| Author | Paul E. Johnson |
| ISBN | 0195098358 |
During The Second Great Awakening’s religious revival of evangelicalism, Robert Matthews- the self-appointed prophet Matthias- was one of many to create and spread his own ultimately doomed religion, a patriarchal Kingdom of Truth in which Matthias sat at the head as the Father and redeemer....
Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People
| Author | Jon Butler |
| ISBN | 0674056019 |
Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in...
Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History
| Author | Alan Charles Kors |
| ISBN | 0812217519 |
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2001
The highly-acclaimed first edition of this book chronicled the rise and fall of witchcraft in Europe between the twelfth and the end of the seventeenth centuries. Now greatly expanded, the classic anthology of contemporary...
