In the Devil's Snare

A fascinating exploration of the Salem witch trials that illustrates how the New England girls whose accusations lead to the wrongful execution of thirteen innocent women and imprisonment of some two hundred more were victims of war trauma in the Maine woods. During the so-called King Phillip’s War, Puritan immigrants who seized land as part of their Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter waged horrific, brutal battles with Native Americans defending their land from coveters and invaders. Their wives and children were there to witness and suffer it. This book was a key to my greater understanding of the land seizure and… show more.

While there is no one all-encompassing reason the 1692 panic proceeded as it did, Norton’s account presents the terrors and violence of the earthly warfare that dominated so many lives at that time, influenced everyone one else, and which had been largely ignored by previous accounts of the trials. 

The Salem trials of 1692 have captured the public imagination like no other witch-panic in history. This is partly due to Arthur Miller’s famous play, The Crucible, which made a searing political allegory out of the episode for 1950s America. Miller had a perceptive sense of the issues and especially the language of the time, but one legacy of his drama was over-simplification of the causes, which were complicated and deep-seated, both in Salem’s past and within relationships and individuals. Many historians have worked to set the record straight, to the extent that there are now literally hundreds of books… show more.