Salem Witch Trials (Term Paper Sample)

Salem Witch Trials
Doris M Kimongo
U.S.I.U-Africa
November 11, 2014
SALEM WITCH TRIALS
The iniquitous Salem trials were conducted for the period spanning February1692 to May 1693. The trials comprised of a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts. Even though the trials were chiefly known as Salem witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in numerous towns in the Province of Massachusetts Bay; Ipswich, Andover, and Salem Town (Boyer & Nissenbaum,1996).The infamous trials commenced after the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village became ill(Hoffer, 1997). When the two girls failed to show any improvement, the village doctor, William Griggs, was summoned (LeBeau, 2003). The girls were diagnosed with bewitchment; a pronouncement which triggered forces that would gradually lead to death of nineteen men and women. Additionally, one man was crushed to death and seven others died as they served their prison sentences.
In order to understand the happenings of the Salem witch trials, it is imperative to investigate the time-epoch during which the events occurred. There were usual stresses of 17th-century life in Massachusetts Bay. Amongst the Salem Village religious fanatics there was an ardent belief in the devil; deemed to be the master of all the misfortunes and calamities (Boyer & Nissenbaum, 1996). Moreover, a recent small pox outbreak and the threat of attack by warring tribes created a fertile ground for fear and mistrust. A wave of paranoia spread throughout colonial Massachusetts at a spiraling spate, a special court convened in Salem to hear the bewitchment cases. Bridget Bishop was the first to be convicted with the crime of bewitchment and she was hanged (Hoffer, 1997). Eighteen other convicts followed, while one hundred and fifty more people were accused over the next several months. By September 1692, the hysteria abated as the public opinion over the trials changed. The Massachusetts General Court inevitably annulled guilty verdicts against accused witches and granted indemnities to their families (Boyer & Nissenbaum, 1996).
In January 1697, the Court declared a day of fasting for the misfortune of the Salem witch trials; it later deemed the trials as illegitimate (LeBeau, 2003). The leading justice Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for the role he played during the prosecution process. The Massachusetts Colony passed legislation which restored good names of the condemned persons and provided financial reimbursement to their heirs in 1711(Boyer & Nissenbaum,1996). This did not however heal the community as bitterness and acrimony lingered on, the agonizing legacy of the Salem witch trials would endure for centuries.
References
Boyer, P.A. & Nissenbaum, S. (2007). Salem Possessed. Harvard University Press.
Hoffer, P. (2009). The Salem Witchcraft Cases: A Legal History. Kansas: University press of Kansas.
LeBeau, B. (2011).The Story of the Salem Witch Trials (1997). New York: Oxford University Press.
Nineteenth-Century Western Civilization
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Nineteenth-Century Western Civilization
Factually, every society is endowed with institutions with a scrupulous pattern of self-reflection and self-description. In this case, modernity is viewed as an epoch representing the move from agrarian lifestyle towards capitalism, secularization and industrialization (Giddens, 2003). The society was drifting away from the traditional norms that held the society stringently together. This was an era of rebellion and breaking away from astute culture and the many laws that tethered people’s capacity and their creativity. Modernity espoused the feat of power-knowledge, the divorce between cultural sphere to cement global relations the change in the manner people understood how time and space relate and the cult of the new.
Modernity commenced with a radical break off from the traditional society and its cultural typecast. The traditional society accepted symbols and established order which was sanctioned by both fable and religion; on the contrary modernity spawned critical ...