The History of Witchcraft in America assembles a capacious record of accusation, belief, law, and historical memory from colonial New England through later nineteenth-century reinterpretations. Its materials move among sermon-like polemic, legal and antiquarian history, moral reflection, ethnographic speculation, and popular narrative, revealing witchcraft as both a lived social crisis and a contested cultural symbol. Accounts of the Salem prosecutions stand prominently within a wider inquiry into supernatural belief, evidentiary standards, communal fear, and the changing authority of religious institutions. The contributors bring together foundational colonial voices and later historians, ministers, reform-minded writers, and students of folklore. Cotton and Increase Mather illuminate the theological and providential frameworks that shaped seventeenth-century interpretations, while subsequent commentators revisit those frameworks with the archival habits, skepticism, and historical consciousness of later generations. Across these differing idioms, the collection traces an important transition: from demonological certainty and communal discipline toward critical historiography and debates over credulity, justice, psychology, and social prejudice. This volume is especially valuable for readers seeking to encounter American witchcraft not as a single episode but as an evolving field of testimony and interpretation. Its multiplicity of perspectives invites close comparison of sources, assumptions, and narrative methods. Students of American history, religion, law, folklore, and gendered social anxieties will find a rich educational resource and a compelling dialogue between the past's fears and later efforts to understand them.
Zusammenfassung
British Colonies on the east coast of North American continent had been settled by religious refugees seeking to build a pure, Bible-based society. They lived closely with the sense of the supernatural and they intended to build a society based on their religious beliefs. That is what caused numerous quarrels, troubles and accusations among which the witchcraft was quite common and the most dangerous. While witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the mid-17th century, they continued in the American Colonies. The earliest recorded witchcraft execution in America was in 1647 in Connecticut. The witch hunt in American Colonies culminated with the Salem Trials when over 200 people were accused, and 19 of whom were found guilty and executed by hanging. This collection contains books that depict the history of witchcraft and witch trials in the USA. Introduction: The Superstitions of Witchcraft by Howard Williams Witchcraft in America: The Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather and Increase Mather Salem Witchcraft by Charles Wentworth Upham Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather by Charles Wentworth Upham A Short History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Trials by M. V. B. Perley An Account of the Witchcraft Delusion at Salem in 1682 by James Thacher House of John Procter, Witchcraft Martyr, 1692 by William P. Upham The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism by Samuel Roberts Wells The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) by John M. Taylor Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism by Allen Putnam