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The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, by Stacy Schiff
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Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff, author of the #1 bestseller Cleopatra, provides an electrifying, fresh view of the Salem witch trials. The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched-at a politically tumultuous time-on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness." With devastating clarity, the textures and tensions of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever. The Witches is Schiff 's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled-in crackling detail and lyrical prose-by one of our most acclaimed historians.
- Sales Rank: #8005 in Books
- Published on: 2016-09-20
- Released on: 2016-09-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.13" h x 1.38" w x 5.38" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of November 2015: In 1692, at the edge of the New England wilderness, an entire village went insane. Everyone knows the story: The pre-teen daughters of the local minister are mysteriously overcome by convulsions, their uncontrollable screaming sending the superstitious community into fear and confusion. Lacking other explanations--adolescent rebellion, maybe?--Satanic influence is suspected, and accusations of witchcraft soon fly like enchanted broomsticks. The town is pitted against itself, and by the time the hysteria fades, 19 men and women are hanged, another pressed to death.
But what actually happened? Pulitzer Prize-winner Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 steps back from more than three centuries of hyperbole and supposition, giving us our most complete account yet. It can't have been easy: As Schiff points out early in the book, the Puritans of Salem village were often assiduous diarists and record-keepers, but first-hand accounts of the months of the hysteria are mysteriously rare-and those that exist are mainly unreliable. To construct her history, Schiff went through the looking glass, compiling seemingly every fact available to create a historically accurate narrative of events while placing it within the cultural context of 17th century New England. The results are obvious: this book is dense with facts and a large cast of characters, and readers must commit. But Schiff keeps the proceedings rolling with wry humor and an eye for the peculiar-yet-illuminating detail. This isn't The Crucible or Blair Witch; it's light on sensationalism, but rife with real-life toil-and-trouble. The truth, as always, is strange enough.--Jon Foro
Review
"History in the hands of Stacy Schiff is invariably full of life, light, shadow, surprise, clarity of insight, and so it is again and then some in her latest work, The Witches. Few writers combine as she does superb scholarship and an exceptional gift for language with amazing reach and agility of mind. This is a superb book."―David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Wright Brothers
"The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692, and no one else could tell it with the otherworldly flair of Stacy Schiff."―Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Quartet
"Stacy Schiff has beautifully combined remarkable story telling with historical accuracy and insight. She has opened up important new avenues for Salem scholarship."―Bernard Rosenthal, editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
"Stacy Schiff's The Witches is an indelibly etched morality fable, the best recounting of the Salem hysteria in modern times. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Schiff makes the complex seem simple, crafting a taut narrative that takes in religion, politics, folklore, and the intricate texture of daily life in Massachusetts Bay, with particular attention to those 'wonder-working' women and girls who chose this moment to blow apart the Puritan utopia they'd helped to found. It's all here in one devilish, oracular book."―Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller
"Stacy Schiff has brought her extraordinary gifts as researcher and writer to revivify the old but endlessly compelling story of the 1692 Salem witch hunt. Her mastery of detail, her ingenuity in spotting connections and trend lines, and her intuitive feel for the people involved combine in a brilliant portrayal of cascading human tragedy. It is sharply etched. It is ground level. It is emotionally powerful. It is full of surprising twists and turns. If history is time travel, this is a journey readers will never forget."―John Demos, author of Entertaining Salem
"Enchanting. Out of the shadows of the past come excitable young girls, pompous ministers, abusive judges, grieving parents, and angry neighbors, all of them caught up in a terrifying process that seemed to have no end: discovering who among them deserved death for being in league with Satan. The Witches is as close as we will ever come to understanding what happened in and around Salem in 1692. Courtrooms, streets, churches, farm yards, taverns, bedrooms-all became theater-like places where anger, anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy are entangled. An astonishing achievement."―David D. Hall, Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History, Harvard University
"From Cleopatra to the Salem coven. From intelligent rule to hysteria, mayhem, and murder. The Salem witch trials offer Stacy Schiff an out-sized drama that seized Americans' imaginations more than 300 years ago. All of Schiff's books demonstrate her rigor as a historian and her dexterity as a stylist. The Witches proves she has something else: the instincts of a thriller writer. This book needs a seat belt."―Kathryn Harrison, author of Joan of Arc
"Once again Stacy Schiff dazzles us. The Witches is a must read for anyone intrigued by this baffling and horrifying chapter from America's Puritan past. What Schiff uncovers is mesmerizing and shocking. Her meticulous research and lyrical writing lay bare an injustice that we should never forget-lest we repeat it."―Patricia Cornwell, author of Depraved Heart
"This brilliant, compelling book is the most meticulously researched, effectively constructed, and beautifully written work I have read in a very long time. It is dramatic history and also a timeless thriller: who-or what-drove a New England town to madness three centuries ago, resulting in the deaths of nineteen men and women for 'witchcraft?' The answers are astonishing."―Robert K. Massie, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Catherine the Great
"[A] fresh take on the Salem witch trials."―Mackenzie Cummings-Grady, Boston Globe
"Schiff's books are based on serious scholarly research, yet they're conveyed in bright, accessible prose... She displays the same sharp intelligence and eclectic interests that distinguish her body of work."―Publishers Weekly (Most Anticipated Books of the Fall)
"The Pulitzer-winning historian conjures a big year for witchcraft hysteria and hangings."―New York Magazine (Best of the Fall)
"Riveting nonfiction."―Entertainment Weekly (Fall Books Preview)
"Schiff, who had a hit with her biography Cleopatra, may get even more attention for her new look at America's infamous witch trials."―Jane Henderson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Schiff has made a career of exploring the private lives of iconic women throughout history.... Now she's expanding her focus to a group of notable women: the women in the center of the hysteria over witches that consumed the early days of the U.S. colonies.... The episode lasted only a year, but had a sizable influence on our nation's history, which Schiff's book will unpack with her elegant prose and exhaustive research."―Shelby Pope, KQED
"This fully documented narrative...will find a welcome audience among readers of witchcraft or colonial histories as well as Schiff's legion of fans."―Library Journal
"Compulsively readable.... The best-selling Schiff never disappoints, and her eagerly anticipated account of the Salem witchcraft tragedy lives up to expectations, providing a fascinating account of one of the most infamous years in American history."―Margaret Flanagan, Booklist (starred review)
"Schiff delves into the archive to remind us that one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history was also one of the few moments which featured regular women-not queens, not goddesses, but mothers and wives and daughters and servants-at the very center of drastic historical change. A wrenching, unforgettable read."―Katherine Howe, author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
"The Witches is a vivid investigation of the original American nightmare. Stacy Schiff brilliantly teases apart the strands of myth and history. In an age when superstition remains a vibrant and dangerous force, her book is, alas, also relevant."―Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World
"[Schiff] reconstructs the time and place in remarkable detail, offering portraits of the protagonists in all their poignant, if often infuriating, humanity. Through an immersive narrative involving a cast of dozens pulled from the historical record, Schiff skillfully re-creates the visceral tensions at the heart of everyday life in the Massachusetts Bay settlement."―Peter Manseau, Bookforum
"A vivid picture of 1692 Massachusetts [that] brings the Salem trials to life."―Steve Bennett, San Antonio Express News
"Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a reliably entertaining guide...[to] one of the strangest, most fascinating chapters in American history."―Tom Beer, Newsday
"You might be frightened by how much of what Schiff uncovers about the way women were seen in American society in 1692 still resonates in contemporary culture."―Refinery29
"The fall's biggest history title."―Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today
"No stone [is] left unturned.... Schiff recreates the most chill-inducing, finger-pointing months in American history."―Steph Opitz, Marie Claire
"Few authors set the scene of history quite like Stacy Schiff.... The Witches brings a fresh eye to the worst misogynist atrocity in American history, tracing the complex cultural and psychological origins of the Puritan hysteria."―Megan O'Grady, Vogue.com
"Unlike the drudgery of the movie adaptation of The Crucible, which you probably watched in high school, Schiff writes with conviction and a strong sense of narrative, elevating the dry snooze of history to a new level. It's an endlessly fascinating read."―Megan Reynolds, Gawker
"Schiff possesses a talent for forcing us to rethink what we know.... The Witches explodes a lot of myths."―Deirdre Donahue, AARP
"[A] must-read."―Joanna Coles, Cosmopolitan
"Schiff's account is better written than any I have encountered....you are likely to find yourself turning the pages (as I did) with a sense that until now you'd never quite taken in what happened...[a] brilliantly assured narrative."―John Wilson, Christianity Today
"Fantastic."―Kristin Van Ogtrop, Time
"Sumptuous.... [This] sweeping history of the Salem witch trials resonates with its exploration of religion and paranoia.... Schiff nimbly connects Salem's fatal mania to subsequent witch-hunts, such as McCarthyism and the rise of Movement conservatism, revealing how close we remain to the specters and demons that stalked the Bay Colony more than three centuries ago."―Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Meticulous and disturbing.... One of Schiff's strongest contributions to this American horror story is her constant reminder that while we may never be able to definitively explain exactly why 19 people (and two dogs) were executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts (owing in part to a concerted effort to expunge any public records), we can still learn something from it."―Buzzy Jackson, Boston Globe
"A masterful account.... Schiff painstakingly reconstructs not just the events of 1692 but the world that birthed them.... Her accomplishment is all the more remarkable because there are no records of the court sessions-Schiff sifted through archival material as well as historical accounts written by witnesses years after the epidemic."―Elizabeth Hand, Los Angeles Times
"With fresh feminist insight, Schiff plumbs the mindset of late-seventeenth-century New England to explain our original 'national crackup.'"―Louisa Kamps, Elle
"Schiff delves into the minds and history of 1692 Salem as no one has before."―Laura DeMarco, Cleveland Plain Dealer
"With a bravura introduction, Schiff sets the stage, painting Salem as a backwater populated by a few hundred humorless and self-righteous souls.... Schiff's contribution is her ability to render history in vital detail, and from a contemporary perspective."―Claudia Rowe, Seattle Times
"A brilliant, exceptionally well-researched account of the 1692 Salem witch trials.... Much of what is so compelling about The Witches is how vividly Schiff brings this very different era to life.... This narrative approach works so well because Schiff just happens to be a superb and witty writer.... The Witches definitely sparkles."―Alden Mudge, BookPage
"Dazzling.... Schiff is at her best, infusing a historical event with as much life, mystery, and tragedy of any novelist."―Nicole Jones, Vanity Fair
"Compulsively readable.... Schiff expertly unknots what drove the Puritans to mass delusion. The reasons are timeless.... That the 1692 Salem witch trials were an anomaly is an illusion of the vantage point; we remain fascinated because we sense in our skin (and see in the news) that the same could be happening right now."―Nancy Rommelmann, Newsday
"Schiff brings to bear a sensibility as different from the Puritans' as can be imagined: gentle, ironic, broadly empathetic, with a keen eye for humor and nuance.... Thanks to this, and to Schiff's narrative gifts, the present-day reader flits above New England's smoky chimneys and thatched rooftops, swoops into the locked studies of magistrates and clergymen; stalks among the jealousies and rivalries of village schemers; even dwells briefly in the innermost thoughts of schoolchildren dead three centuries and more. It is wizardry of a sort-in a flash of brimstone, a whole world made wondrously visible."―Adam Goodheart, Atlantic
"[Schiff] brings her gifts to the confusions of Salem, piecing together a dramatic narrative from disparate and often tersely unrevealing sources, including diaries, memoirs, and court reports. She never lacks for an apt detail, drawing on academic studies that focus on everything from the region's sexual mores to the way sounds echoed in the atmosphere."―Ruth Franklin, Harper's
About the Author
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Cleopatra: A Life, a #1 bestseller and winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
133 of 136 people found the following review helpful.
How I Wish She'd Organized It Better
By John Sparks
If there's one historical event that the citizens of the United States had better never forget, it's the 1692 Salem Witch Craze, and historian Stacy Schiff's newest work could have gone a long way towards re-establishing the tragedies and injustices of the Witch Trials in the public consciousness--if the public could read it. In spite of all the laudatory blurbs provided to Amazon by the work's publisher, twice the number of Amazon Customer reviewers give it one or two stars than give it five. Three- and four-star reviews are in shortest supply. Sadly, there's a reason for this. "The Witches: Salem, 1692" is probably one of the most disorganized contemporary historical works that I've seen. The author begins by a caustic dismissal of perhaps the best known popular history of the Witch hysteria, Marion Starkey's 1949 "The Devil in Massachusetts", and undoubtedly the best known fictional portrayal, Arthur Miller's "The Crucible": "The Holocaust sent Marion Starkey toward Salem witchcraft in 1949. She produced the volume that would inspire Arthur Miller to write 'The Crucible' at the outset of the McCarthy crisis. Along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Miller has largely made off with the story (p. 11)."
That sounds an awful lot like sour grapes, but to be fair, Stacy Schiff may have one legitimate gripe. She argues that most recent historians before her, including Starkey, have utilized sources that have been traditionally viewed as primary, but which are actually secondary, to begin the witchcraft story--namely, the monographs the ministers Increase and Cotton Mather penned one to five years after the craze had subsided. Only from the Mather writings, she contends, do we get the idea that the girls of Salem Village were introduced to witchcraft by elementary voudoun and fortune telling practiced by the Parris family's West Indian slave, Tituba, and Schiff theorizes that this was a "must-have-been" hypothesis supplied by the Mathers rather than an "actually-was" fact that could be gleaned from court documents or other contemporary records. For all that, though, Schiff chooses to prove her point by an eye-crossing myriad of dry, repetitive, poorly-arranged data that goes in, around, up, down, across, and through the chronological line to suggest that not only interpersonal community tensions but a confusing Gordian knot of other contributory factors, including even the political attitudes of a cabal of ministers who had worked together to oust the previous governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Edward Andros, and establish the new one, William Phips, all had their part in the great witch scare.
I note with dismay how many other reviewers remark that they gave up trying to read the book, or simply started skimming, after so many pages along, because finally, on pp. 386-398, Schiff offers her own thoughts on the phenomenon's causes: hysteria, as defined first by Jean-Martin Charcot and later Sigmund Freud. And, by the anthropomorphic, schizophrenic-as-the-humans-who-thought-it-up God that the Puritans worshiped, she stands a danged good chance of being right. But if Schiff had only stated her thesis at her work's beginning and built her historical case around it in an orderly and logical manner, much as Marion Starkey had done with her own thoughts in 1949 however much they may have been influenced by Cotton and Increase Mather's after-the-fact hypotheses, Schiff could have produced a much more readable and compelling volume.
219 of 237 people found the following review helpful.
Tedious, vague and overlong
By E. Smiley
This book, a historical account of the Salem witch trials by an author whose prior work has been highly acclaimed, turned out to be a long-winded and tedious disappointment. I regret the many hours I spent slogging through it.
Schiff takes a textbook-like approach to the writing, throwing facts and assertions at the reader without connecting them through any meaningful narrative. We learn little about the accusers and victims; those curious about the lives, personalities, and motivations of the people most directly involved will be disappointed. There is more information about the witchcraft judges and the local ministers – in fact, perhaps the two most-discussed figures are Increase and Cotton Mather, prominent ministers who were not present for any of the events in Salem. Lengthy accounts of accusations and confessions are included, relating fanciful stories as if they were true: “Skimming groves of oak, mossy bogs, and a tangle of streams, Anne Foster sailed above the treetops, over fields and fences, on a pole. . . . Before Foster on the pole sat Martha Carrier, half Foster’s age and the dauntless mother of four. Carrier had arranged the flight. She had persuaded Foster to accompany her; she knew the way.”
Many pages are spent paraphrasing such accusations, but very few on analysis. The book has no organizing principle or thesis, focuses on no key figures, and has almost nothing to say about why the events in Salem might have occurred. And the writing style makes for laborious reading; it alternates between drowning the reader in details whose import to the larger picture is unclear, and wallowing in wordy abstractions that utterly fail to enlighten. It is often repetitive, and sometimes jumps between ideas that have no apparent connection.
I give a second star because the book appears to be well-researched, and I did learn some information about colonial New England. It sheds light on the strains placed on the community, such as deadly Indian attacks nearby; many of the young accusers were refugees or orphans. We also learn a bit about life at the time.
But despite the lengthy bibliography, the author makes sweeping generalizations that hurt her credibility; for instance, she claims the Salem witch trials were one of few occasions that women played a key role in American history and that after Salem, women “went back to being invisible, where they remained, historically speaking, until a different scourge encouraged them to raise their voices, with suffrage and Prohibition.” Women were invisible and had no effect on history in all of the 18th and 19th centuries? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, Louisa May Alcott, Sojourner Truth, Clara Barton, Belle Boyd, Dorothea Dix, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Van Lew, Sacagawea, and many more would beg to differ.
For that matter, the Salem witch trials themselves were a local event occurring in a few small towns; it would be hard to argue that any of the women or men involved had much impact on American history, especially compared with those listed above. Salem represents neither the first nor the last time people were executed for witchcraft in America, and while with its 20 executions, Salem claimed the greatest number of victims at once, it pales beside many European witch hunts. Perhaps my frustration with this book has soured me on this piece of history, but having read The Witches, it is even less clear to me why Salem has gained such a foothold in the national imagination.
Ultimately, Schiff can’t explain Salem, nor can she make it interesting. Instead, she gives us a 400+ page summary of her research, then concludes that we have too little information to know why anything happened as it did. In other words, as far as I'm concerned, it's a whole lot of nothing. Those with a keen interest in the witch trials may find it worthwhile, but for the general reader looking to be informed and entertained by well-written, engaging historical accounts, this is one to avoid.
127 of 136 people found the following review helpful.
Novelistic and terrifying
By Scott Chamberlain
Like many people, I’ve long been fascinated by the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. They seems to embody so many contradictions and unsolvable debates that sit at the core of American life, such as public good vs. the rights of the rights of the individual, individual courage vs. mob mentality, or religion vs. rationalism. Plus, the struggle to create a just legal system, public safety, the idea of capital punishment, what constitutes as legal evidence, presumption of innocence, and more. It was the first moral panic to hit American society, and we’ve been grappling with its meaning ever since—especially every time a new panic emerges. Sometimes these panics are relatively benign, but the experience with Sen. McCarthy or the McMartin Day Care controversy show us that witch craze-like hysteria is still very much with us today.
I was pleased to see Stacy Schiff’s new study of this disturbing chapter of American history. There are hundreds of works on the subject (fiction and non-fiction), but none of them is absolutely perfect. “Salem Possessed” by Boyer and Nissenbaum is a classic that delves deeply into the social roots of the 1692 panic, but for all its detail it feels incomplete for me--it does a brilliant job of explaining why such a craze *could* have happened, but is less successful on why it *did* happen. “The Crucible” is a brilliant work of theater, but it completely re-works events and people to make its own point. Any of the number of works looking for a single cause—food poisoning, lead poisoning, misogyny, etc.—usually feel needlessly reductionist… or sensationalist.
Schiff provides a different sort of work; for me it worked quite well, but readers should know what they’re getting into.
The strength is Schiff’s vivid writing. She brilliantly brings Salem Village, its environs, and its inhabitants to life. There is a wealth of details told with sharp, insightful turns of phrase that allow you to get a clear sense of what’s happening. She is particularly successful in showing just what an alien world the New Englanders inhabited; it is clearly America, but a kind of proto-America that’s very different from the America we know today.
Once the trials begin, the work reads like a novel. Schiff skillfully uses foreshadowing and other literary techniques to keep the momentum going and to help clarify the events. This is necessary, as the story of the Salem Witch Trials is a communal story, and there is a huge cast of characters with mixed (and changing) motivations to keep track of. The trials take up a significant section of the book, and I while I thought they were deftly told, I can see some readers becoming bleary-eyed by the wealth of details. It helps that Schiff provides a cast of characters.
One problem with Schiff’s prose is that sometimes, for me, it verges into being too colloquial. There are numerous references to “The Wizard of Oz,” Harry Potter, and other bits of pop culture. I’m sure many readers would find them familiar and witty, although at times I found them arch.
Readers should also be aware that this is book clearly falls into the category of popular history rather than scholarly history. Don’t get me wrong—it is knowledgeable and makes great use of a variety of scholarly sources. But at its core, Schiff is less concerned about breaking new historical ground or presenting a deep analysis than she is about bringing this horrible episode to life for modern readers. In this she is hugely successful, making the Salem trials relevant, terrifying, and all-too familiar.
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