Excerpt
SUMMARY: In 1692, the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts, became caught up in a fervor over alleged witchcraft. In her new book “The Witches,” Stacy Schiff explores what led a group of Puritans to execute 19 people. She sits down with Jeffrey Brown to discuss why the events still captivate us centuries later.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): An exceptionally severe winter in Massachusetts, a minister’s daughter began to scream and went into convulsions. Less than a year later, 19 men and women had been hanged and one man crushed to death.
It was all part of the Salem witch trails, and they are the focus of the latest add to the NewsHour Bookshelf.
Biographer Stacy Schiff turns her gaze to “The Witches: Salem, 1692.”
She recently talked with Jeffrey Brown.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The first thing that hits me here is nine months. All of this unfolded in nine months, in one year.
STACY SCHIFF, “The Witches: Salem, 1692?: Frightening speed, right?
JEFFREY BROWN: Frightening speed.
STACY SCHIFF: Yes.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
STACY SCHIFF: It’s exponential. It begins with two little girls, presumably bewitched, and names begin to fly about. And before you know it, you have this explosive number of accusations.
JEFFREY BROWN: Before you know it, that’s what — and then it comes to an end.
STACY SCHIFF: Right.
JEFFREY BROWN: And yet it has lived on.
STACY SCHIFF: Right.
And that’s interesting that it’s a stuttering start. Just, it flames to life, and then it dies out very quickly as well, and, yes, lives on partly because we think of this as something very unlikely to have happened in enlightened America.
This is the kind of thing that we — that happened in the medieval world in Europe. It didn’t happen here on our shores.
JEFFREY BROWN: There are so many vivid characters here. Is there one that you could — that you remember kind of hitting you in the gut, that made you think — yes?
STACY SCHIFF: I guess in terms of what is most beguiling, there’s a minister at the center of this crisis who is accused of witchcraft.
And he’s partly a very compelling and many-sided character, and he’s partly unexpected, because you assume that the accused witches were all women. And here you have a Harvard-educated minister who has been accused of witchcraft, and who is said to be, moreover, not just a wizard, but a conjurer. He’s a rank above a wizard, so he is invested with these particularly terrific powers.
And all fingers seem to point to him. He’s the one who begins to minister diabolical sabbaths, or say the confessors, in the parsonage field in Salem village.
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