Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II

Charles Wentworth Upham’s extensive nineteenth-century history reconstructs the Salem witch trials through records, family histories, maps and local geography. Written long after the executions, it seeks to explain how accusation spread through a tightly connected community and overwhelmed ordinary safeguards. Some interpretations have been revised by later scholarship, but the documentary labour remains important. The work reveals Salem not as a distant legend but as inhabited ground, where familiar roads and houses became the architecture of an invisible emergency.

Nineteenth-century New England historical study