Six weeks in, and the accused are coming into focus. This week our lesson opens with Sarah Good, one of the first three people accused along with Tituba and Sarah Osborne, and follows her story from the parsonage door to the gallows. Along the way, the course traces the transatlantic exchange of books and pamphlets that shaped how witch trials were conducted in America, the folk magic that colonists practiced even as they accused their neighbors of witchcraft, and the Swedish witch-hunt of 1669 that introduced the concept of flying witches and satanic sabbaths into New England testimony. The 980 surviving primary source documents from the trials, warrants, jailer’s records, examination transcripts, and petitions from the condemned, ground all of this in the historical record. The week closes with the Towne sisters, Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, and Sarah Cloyce, and the weekly podcast examines the case of Mary Black, an enslaved woman whose life is documented only because she was accused. Woven throughout is the story of Dorothy Good, arrested at age four, whose life after the trials shows that the consequences of 1692 did not end when the courts stopped.
This Week’s Content
Daily Videos (Salem Witch Trials Daily YouTube Playlist) February 2: Sarah Good February 3: Transatlantic Communication February 4: Folk Magic February 5: Primary Sources February 6: The Swedish Connection February 7: Dorothy Good February 8: The Towne Sisters
Weekly Podcast: The Thing About Salem: “Mary Black: An Enslaved Woman Accused of Witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials” Explore the story of Mary Black, an enslaved woman in the household of Lieutenant Nathaniel Putnam, who was accused, jailed for nine months, and cleared, but whose survival was met with silence rather than support.
Sarah Good: Poverty as Evidence of Evil
On February 2, 1692, Sarah Good went to the Salem Village parsonage to beg money for herself and her two children, four-year-old Dorothy and an infant. The minister, Samuel Parris, gave something to Dorothy, and Sarah Good allegedly went away muttering something under her breath. After this incident, the mysterious illness afflicting the minister’s daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail, intensified. Reverend Parris later interpreted Sarah Good’s parting words as a curse.
Sarah was born Sarah Soulart in Wenham, Massachusetts around 1653, the daughter of an established innkeeper named John Soulart who by suicide when she was young. While he left a substantial estate valued at 500 pounds, Sarah and her sisters were effectively left out of any inheritance.
By 1692, Sarah had married her second husband, William Good, a laborer described as a weaver who struggled to keep employment. The family was destitute. They had no permanent home and turned to neighbors for charity. In the Puritan mindset, poverty was not just a misfortune. It was often viewed as a moral failing, a sign that God had turned away from that person.
When refused charity, Sarah Good was said to walk away muttering. She claimed she was reciting commandments or Psalms, but her neighbors interpreted her words as curses. In February 1692, when the sickness began in the household of the minister, Sarah Good was named alongside Tituba and Sarah Osborne as one of the tormenters.
On February 29, the warrant was issued. Constable George Locker arrested her and brought her to Ingersoll’s Tavern on March 1. The crowd was so massive they had to move the examination to the nearby meetinghouse. The magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin pressed her hard. They asked, “What evil spirit have you familiarity with?” Sarah Good answered simply, “None.” When they asked why she hurt the children, she replied, “I do not hurt them. I scorn it.”
The testimony against her continued to build, not just from the afflicted girls who displayed fits in the courtroom, but from her own husband. William Good testified against Sarah. He called her “an enemy to all good” and said he feared she was a witch, the very definition of enemy to good.
When Sarah was arrested, she had a daughter, Dorothy, who was between four and five years old, and she had given birth to a baby girl in December. That infant was taken to jail with Sarah. The conditions in the Salem and Boston jails were cold, filthy, and expensive, as prisoners had to pay for their own upkeep. The infant died in custody before Sarah was executed. Dorothy was arrested and shackled as well. At four years old, she was interrogated and confessed to being a witch, answering leading questions that her mother had given her a snake as a familiar.
Sarah Good never confessed. She maintained her innocence to the very end. On July 19, she was taken to Procter’s Ledge to be hanged alongside four other women. There, she delivered one of the most famous lines in witch trial history. The Reverend Nicholas Noyes urged her to confess, telling her she was a witch and she knew it. Sarah Good declared, “You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard. If you take my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Legend, not historical records, reports that years later, Nicholas Noyes died of a hemorrhage, choking on his own blood.
Sarah Good was a woman who had lost everything. Her wellbeing, any resources, her husband’s support, her ability to care for her new baby. She and her daughters sat in jail. But she never lost her voice.
Transatlantic Communication: The Information Superhighway
We often think of the early American colonies as isolated settlements on the edge of a dangerous frontier, but the truth is the Atlantic Ocean was an information superhighway. Ideas, laws, and panic traveled on ships. Transatlantic communication, specifically the distribution of books, pamphlets, and letters, played a definitive role in shaping how witch trials were conducted in America.
The witch hunts in Connecticut and Massachusetts in the late 1640s coincided with the rise of Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General in England. Historians we have spoken with believe that the leaders of Connecticut were reading Hopkins’ book, The Discovery of Witches, and conducting prosecutions with his book practically in hand.
We see the physical evidence of this communication in the legal procedures. The technique of watching, keeping a suspect awake and under constant observation to see if a familiar spirit appears, was a hallmark of the English trials. Yet this exact method was used on Margaret Jones in Boston in 1648.
Before 1692, New England’s accused witches were accused of harming a neighbor’s cow or making a child sick. They were not typically flying through the air to massive parties with the devil until Salem. The introduction of flight came because of a book. The Reverend Cotton Mather had read accounts of the Great Noise, the massive witch-hunt in Sweden in 1669. Mather incorporated these accounts into his own writings, likely pulling from Joseph Glanvil’s English book, Saducismus Triumphatus. This literature introduced New Englanders to the idea of witches flying on poles and attending a satanic Sabbath.
Salem residents began describing what they had read or heard about from Europe, and the panic echoed back across the ocean. Cotton Mather’s book, Wonders of the Invisible World, which detailed the Salem trials, traveled back to Scotland. In the Bargarran Witch Trials of 1697, the family of the afflicted girl, Christian Shaw, had read Mather’s accounts. Consequently, Christian Shaw’s symptoms in Scotland began to mirror the symptoms of the girls in Salem.
It was an information revolution. The printing of the Malleus Maleficarum centuries earlier had standardized the concept of the witch across Europe, and by the late 17th century, New England had a highly literate populace. When we look at Salem, we are not just looking at an isolated and local dispute. We are looking at the result of a global exchange of folklore, theology, and fear.
Folk Magic: The Home Security System of Colonial America
We stepped away from the courtroom and into the kitchen and the hearth to talk about something that was strictly forbidden by the ministers but practiced by almost everyone including the Magistrates and Governor Phips: folk magic. The accusers and the neighbors were often the ones using magic. They called it countermagic, or what historian Emerson Baker calls the home security system of Colonial America.
In a world where people believe a neighbor can hurt their livestock or their children just by looking at them, protection matters. One of the most common methods used in this erea was the witch bottle. People would take a bottle and fill it with urine, usually the victim’s urine, along with pins, nails, or other sharp metal objects. By boiling this urine and pin mixture or burying it under the hearth, it was believed to inflict pain on the witch who may have cast a spell or curse, tormenting the tormentor until they revealed themselves or the curse broke.
Roger Toothaker, a folk healer who died in prison during the trials, famously claimed he had taught his daughter how to kill a witch by boiling urine.
It was not just bottles. Historic homes in New England sometimes reveal old shoes concealed in the walls, near chimneys or doors. Colonists believed witches entered through portals, doorways, windows, and especially chimneys, so they would hide objects like shoes or even desiccated cats in the walls to distract or trap the evil spirit before it could enter the room. Apotropaic symbols, like hexafoils or daisy wheels, were used on mantles and beams to ward off the evil.
Folk magic was not just for protection. It was also used to see the future. One popular method was called the Venus Glass or oomancy. This involved dropping an egg white into a glass of water, and the shape of the egg white was supposed to resemble the tool of the trade of a future husband. There is no record directly tying this magic to Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, but was reported as a dangerous game that had killed its player. There were also references to the sieve and scissors, where a sieve was balanced on shears to answer yes or no questions.
But the most famous act of folk magic in Salem was something that was eaten: the witch cake. In late February 1692, a neighbor named Mary Sibley instructed Parris’s enslaved servants, Tituba and John Indian, on how to make this English countermagic cake. They took rye meal and mixed it with urine of Betty and Abigail, baked it in the ashes, and fed it to a dog. The theory was that the dog, being a common familiar for the devil, would hurt the witch and force her to reveal herself. Instead of stopping the afflictions, the girls started naming witches immediately after. Samuel Parris claimed this act raised the devil in Salem. Even though folk magic was publicly condemned, it was also relied on in the culture.
Primary Sources: The Voices of the Past
How do we know what we know about the Salem Witch Trials? Podcast guest Margo Burns asks us this critical question. We are fortunate to have a massive, though incomplete, collection of primary source documents. The definitive collection for this study is titled Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, published in 2009. Margo Burns, the associate editor and project manager of that undertaking, explained that it took a team of 12 scholars over 10 years to locate, organize, and transcribe all of these documents. They scoured 12 different archives, including the Peabody Essex Museum and the Massachusetts State Archives.
It is important to note that the official record books of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the actual reports from the trials, are missing. They likely have not survived. Many documents were probably lost when Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s house was ransacked during the Stamp Act riot in the 18th century. The mob threw his papers into the street, and we probably lost the official court records in the mud that night.
However, what we do have are the loose papers, the working documents of the legal process. 980 of these records survive. These include arrest warrants and documentations of the preliminary examinations, which contain the actual back-and-forth interrogation between the magistrates, like John Hathorne, and the accused. Those examinations vary by the scribe. If Samuel Parris wrote it down, he tried to capture every word. Other scribes might just summarize the event. Except for a few petitions composed by the accused, we don’t actually have their own side of the story.
One of the most heartbreaking types of documents are the jailers’ records. We have accounts from jailers like John Arnold in Boston. These lists tell exactly when someone was booked, when they were released, or if they died in custody. They detailed the cost of each suspect’s food and shackles. The archives even contain the bills from blacksmiths for making the chains used on the prisoners.
There are also petitions written by the accused themselves. Mary Esty’s petition to the court, written after she had been condemned to die, is one of the most powerful documents in American history. She pleaded not for her own life, but that no more innocent blood be shed. The original copy of that petition still exists. The team behind Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt had to analyze the handwriting of over 200 people to determine who wrote what. Previous transcripts from the 1970s relied on Works Progress Administration transcripts from the 1930s, which were full of errors, including testimonies dated after a person had already been executed because of transcription mistakes. The 2009 collection fixed those errors and put everything in chronological order, allowing us to see how the crisis unfolded day by day. Author Marilynne Roach published The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege.
The Swedish Connection: Blockula and Salem
What does a Swedish witch panic from the late 1660s have to do with Salem in 1692? As it turns out, quite a lot. The accounts from Sweden provide a script for what a massive, organized witch conspiracy looks like. According to the accounts, the supposed witches would go to a gravel pit, put garments over their heads and dance around. Then they would run to a crossroads and call upon the devil three times, chanting, “Antecessor, come and carry us to Blockula.”
They described the devil appearing at the crossroads wearing a great coat, red and blue stockings, and a high-crowned hat. He also had a red beard. This red-bearded man would then call upon beasts to carry the witches to a great meadow, Blockula, where they held a Witch’s Sabbath.
Before 1692, the concept of witchcraft in New England was usually much more grounded in local disputes, sick cows, or neighbors muttering curses. The idea of flying through the air to a massive diabolical party was not the standard narrative. As author Stacy Schiff noted, before this period, witches in New England had never flown. The idea of a witch being able to fly to do her business was a continental concept. And this concept came through the library of Reverend Cotton Mather.
Mather had obtained accounts of the European Witch Panic, specifically the Swedish Witch Trials of 1669, and incorporated them into his own bestselling writings. In the Salem records, we find Tituba and others describing flying on poles to meetings and the devil carrying them. The accusers in Salem were no longer describing local folk magic. They were describing a vast, organized conspiracy that mirrored the accounts from Blockula. The afflicted people in Massachusetts were influenced by how the afflicted children behaved in the Swedish witch panic known as the Great Noise. The Swedish trials were instigated by children telling colorful tales of being abducted by witches and carried off to sabbaths. In Salem, some of the afflicted people reported visiting these sabbaths. The narratives are remarkably consistent across the Swedish trials and the panic in Massachusetts.
Dorothy Good: The Youngest Accused
Dorothy, sometimes called Dorcas in older texts, was only four or five years old when she was arrested, interrogated, and chained in the dungeon. While she was not executed like her mother, Sarah Good, the effects of that imprisonment followed her for the rest of her life. Dorothy was finally released from jail on December 10, 1692, after spending nearly nine months in custody.
Rachel Christ-Doane’s research shows that Dorothy’s release did not lead to a stable life. When she was released, she returned to her father, William Good. He had remarried rather quickly to a woman named Elizabeth after his wife Sarah had been executed. William Good eventually petitioned the colony for restitution in 1710, claiming that the imprisonment had so ruined and destroyed his daughter, Dorothy, that she was ungovernable and a financial burden. Her father took the settlement money and abandoned Dorothy and his new wife, leaving them to the care of the town.
Recent research into the town records of Salem and Beverly by Christ Doanes reveals a transient, unstable adulthood for Dorothy. She did not have a permanent home. The records show her bouncing around from household to household, dependent on others for her basic survival. For a significant portion of her adult life, Dorothy lived with a man named Jonathan Batchelder in Beverly. That name is significant because Jonathan Batchelder had been one of the accusers who testified against Dorothy’s mother, Sarah Good, during the trials. Was he caring for the daughter of the woman he helped execute out of guilt, or was it simply a matter of the town paying him to do so?
Dorothy’s life was a cycle of institutions and wandering. At various points, she was sent to the house of correction in Salem, a workhouse for the poor that was physically attached to the very jail where she had been traumatized as a child. The records show that Dorothy had two children and never married. She had a son named William and a daughter named Dorothy. Because she was impoverished and unmarried, the town took those children away and indentured them out to other families. Her daughter was indentured to Nathaniel Putnam and her son to Jonathan Batchelder.
A newspaper article from New London, Connecticut, describes the discovery of “a transient vagrant woman named Dorothy Good found dead in a bog meadow.” Was this the same Dorothy Good? The Salem Witch Trials did not end when the courts stopped. For Dorothy Good, the consequences of the witch-hunt lasted a lifetime.
The Towne Sisters: Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, and Sarah Cloyce
On February 8, 1692, news of the new Massachusetts charter arrived in Boston, worrying many who were concerned about the colony losing some of its independence. The Towne sisters, Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, and Sarah Cloyce were the daughters of William and Joanna Towne. Rebecca and Mary were born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England before the family migrated to the colonies. Sarah was born later in Massachusetts. The Townes eventually settled in Topsfield, Massachusetts on a farm that stretched toward Beverly. In 1692, the sisters were grown women with families of their own. They were church members and well respected.
Rebecca Nurse was the oldest at 71 years old. She was sick at the time of her arrest on March 24, 1692, and her community considered her a pious member of the Salem Town church. Her arrest was a shock to many, including herself. Her trial was one of the most notable moments of the entire witch-hunt. The jury initially found her not guilty, but the chief justice, William Stoughton, was not satisfied. He sent the jury back to reconsider. During the trial, another accused woman, Deliverance Hobbs, was brought in. Rebecca asked, “What do you bring her for? She’s one of us.” Did Rebecca mean that she was a fellow prisoner? The court interpreted “one of us” to mean one of us witches. Because Rebecca was elderly, possibly hard of hearing, the courtroom was crowded and noisy, and the afflicted people were screaming, Rebecca could not hear the court ask her to clarify the statement. Her silence was taken as a confession of guilt. She was executed on July 19, 1692.
Mary Esty lived in Topsfield. She was arrested, interrogated, and actually released in May 1692 because the accusers momentarily stopped crying out against her. But then the afflicted girl, Mercy Lewis, fell into fits and claimed Mary’s specter was choking her and would kill her by midnight. Mary was rearrested and dragged to jail in the middle of the night. Mary knew she was going to die, but rather than pleading for her own life, she wrote a petition to the governor, the judges, and the ministers. She asked the judges to examine the accusers separately. Mary Esty was hanged on September 22, 1692, in the final group of executions.
Sarah Cloyce, the youngest sister, was about 20 years younger than Rebecca. Her trouble began in church. The Reverend Samuel Parris preached a sermon titled “Christ Knows How Many Devils There are in His Church,” clearly targeting Rebecca Nurse. Sarah stood up and walked out of the church, allegedly allowing the door to slam behind her. Shortly after, she was accused. The afflicted girls claimed they saw Sarah at the Witches’ Sabbath serving red bread and blood wine as a deacon of the devil. She spent months in the Boston and Ipswich jails but unlike her sisters, she was never tried. The grand jury eventually dismissed the case against her. After her release in January 1693, Sarah and her husband, Peter Cloyce, moved to what is now Framingham, Massachusetts. The road they settled on is called today Salem End Road.
Their legacy lives on today through the Towne Family Association and the many descendants who gather to honor them.
This Week’s Podcast: Mary Black: An Enslaved Woman Accused of Witchcraft
The Thing About Salem explores the story of Mary Black, an enslaved woman who was accused of witchcraft in April 1692. Her story appears in the historical record only because she was accused, examined, imprisoned, and eventually cleared.
Mary Black lived in the household of Lieutenant Nathaniel Putnam. When we hear Putnam in the Salem trials, we think of Thomas, Edward, and Ann Putnam Junior, but this household belonged to Nathaniel Putnam. Nathaniel had real political power. In December 1691, he was the moderator of a town meeting who announced that Minister Samuel Parris’s contract had been broken. He told Salem Village to stop paying Parris’s salary. This financial crisis hit the Parris household just weeks before the afflictions began.
Nathaniel Putnam comes up repeatedly in the record. He had land disputes with the Francis Nurse farm, but it does not appear he used the trials to settle scores. On June 29, 1692, he signed a petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse. He was one of eight Putnams to sign for her. While Thomas and Edward Putnam were filing complaints and Ann Putnam Senior and Junior were among the afflicted accusers, Nathaniel and seven other Putnams signed a petition defending Rebecca Nurse. The Putnam family was not united. They took opposing sides during the trials.
Mary was accused of witchcraft on April 21 and examined on April 22 before Judge Hathorne and Judge Corwin. The transcript was recorded by Samuel Parris. The judges asked, “Be you a witch?” Mary Black was silent. “How long have you been a witch?” “I cannot tell.” Asked again, she replies, “I cannot tell you.” They asked about harming people. “Why do you hurt these folks?” She replied, “I hurt nobody.” “Who doth?” “I do not know.”
She then faced spectral evidence. Several of the afflicted persons said they had been hurt by her, and Mary denied it. They asked her to demonstrate pinning her neck cloth. She did, and when that happened, several of the afflicted cried out that they were pricked. Mary Walcott said she was pricked in her arm until the blood came. Abigail Williams claimed to be pricked in the stomach. Mercy Lewis said she was pricked in the foot.
Mary was imprisoned for nearly nine months. She was released from Boston Jail on January 3, 1693, to go to the jail in Salem for a trial. On January 11, 1693, she was cleared by proclamation at a superior court session held in Salem.
When we contrast Mary Black with Rebecca Nurse, the disparity is clear. Rebecca Nurse was a white woman of standing. 39 people testified to her Christian character. Nathaniel Putnam used political influence on her behalf. There are no defenders on record for Mary Black. No petitions. No testimonies in support. She was in that household, but there are no records of anyone advocating for her.
Once somebody was cleared of charges, they still had to pay jail fees to be released from prison. Did Nathaniel Putnam pay for Mary Black’s release? Did he advocate for her like he did for Rebecca Nurse? The documents do not shed any light on this. Mary Black survived. She was cleared. But the questions her story raises about race, power, and silence in colonial America are questions we must keep asking.
Conclusion
This week moved from the accused to the archives and back again. Sarah Good’s poverty and reputation made her one of the first targets, and she maintained her innocence to the end. The books and pamphlets that crossed the Atlantic shaped not only how the trials were conducted but what the accusers described in their testimony. The folk magic that colonists practiced in their own homes blurred the line between the accusers and the accused. And the 980 surviving primary source documents, from warrants to jailer’s bills to Mary Esty’s petition, make it possible to study the crisis day by day, even as the gaps in those records reveal whose stories colonial America chose to preserve and whose it did not. Dorothy Good and the Towne sisters show that the outcomes of the trials ranged widely, from execution to release to a lifetime of instability, but none of them escaped without consequence.
Where We Are
Week 6 of ~75 weeks | ~8% Complete | January 2026 – May 2027
February 2 through February 8, 1692. The accused are emerging. The documents survive.
Key People This Week
Sarah Good was a destitute woman from Salem Village, one of the first three accused, who never confessed and delivered one of the most famous lines in witch trial history at the gallows before her execution on July 19, 1692
Dorothy Good was the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good, arrested, interrogated, and chained in the dungeon, whose imprisonment affected the rest of her life. A 1761 newspaper article may describe her death as a transient woman found in a bog meadow
William Good was Sarah Good’s husband, a laborer who testified against his own wife, calling her “an enemy to all good,” and later abandoned their daughter Dorothy
Rebecca Nurse was the eldest Towne sister, 71 years old, found not guilty by the jury but convicted after Chief Justice Stoughton sent the jury back, executed July 19, 1692
Mary Esty was the middle Towne sister who wrote a petition pleading not for her own life but that no more innocent blood be shed, executed September 22, 1692
Sarah Cloyce was the youngest Towne sister who walked out of church in protest, was accused and jailed but never tried, survived and moved to Framingham
Mary Black was an enslaved woman in the household of Lieutenant Nathaniel Putnam, accused in April 1692, jailed for nine months, cleared in January 1693, with no defenders on record
Nathaniel Putnam was a powerful Salem Village figure who opposed Parris’s salary, signed a petition defending Rebecca Nurse, and owned Mary Black, but left no record of advocating for her
Margo Burns was the associate editor and project manager of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, the definitive 2009 collection of primary source documents
Cotton Mather was the influential minister whose reading of European witch trial accounts, especially from Sweden, introduced the concepts of flying witches and satanic sabbaths to New England
Roger Toothaker was a folk healer who died in prison during the trials, known for claiming he taught his daughter how to kill a witch by boiling urine
Mary Sibley was the neighbor who instructed Tituba and John Indian on how to make the witch cake, the act Samuel Parris blamed for raising the devil in Salem
Key Terms
Witch Bottle was a bottle filled with the victim’s urine, pins, and nails, boiled or buried to inflict pain on a witch and break a curse
Countermagic was the use of folk magic techniques to protect against or identify witches, practiced widely but condemned by ministers
Witch Cake was an English countermagic cake made from rye meal and the afflicted girls’ urine, baked in ashes and fed to a dog to identify the witch
Apotropaic Symbols were protective markings like hexafoils or daisy wheels carved on mantles and beams to ward off evil spirits
Venus Glass or Oomancy was a fortune-telling method involving dropping an egg white into a glass of water to see the shape of a future husband’s trade tool
Blockula was the great meadow in Swedish witch trial accounts where witches were said to hold a Witch’s Sabbath after being carried there by the devil
The Great Noise was the name for the massive Swedish witch-hunt of 1669, instigated by children’s tales of being abducted by witches
Saducismus Triumphatus was Joseph Glanvil’s English book published in 1681 that contained accounts of the Swedish witch trials and influenced Cotton Mather
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt was the definitive 2009 collection of 980 primary source documents, compiled by 12 scholars over 10 years from 12 archives
Court of Oyer and Terminer was the emergency court whose official record books are missing, likely lost during the Stamp Act riot
Mittimus was a jail receipt documenting the transfer of a prisoner to jail, one of the surviving document types from the trials
Transatlantic Communication was the exchange of books, pamphlets, and letters across the Atlantic that carried witch-hunting methods and panic between England, Sweden, and the American colonies
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Join the Conversation
Sarah Good maintained her innocence at the gallows. Mary Esty petitioned not for her own life but for everyone who came after her. Mary Black survived nine months in jail with no documented support. Dorothy Good carried the consequences of her arrest for the rest of her life. Whose story stands out the most to you, and why? What does it mean that 980 documents survive but still cannot answer basic questions about Mary Black’s experience?
Drop your thoughts in the comments.
See you next week.
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Sources & Further Reading
Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience Bernard Rosenthal, ed.,
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Richard Godbeer, The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692
Joseph Glanvil, Saducismus Triumphatus (1681)
Podcast Episode: Rachel Christ-Doane on the Salem Witch Museum and the Life of Dorothy Good https://aboutwitchhunts.com/early-modern/rachel-christ-doane-on-the-salem-witch-museum-and-the-life-of-dorothy-good/
Primary Sources:
Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009) / Salem Witchcraft Papers (1977) / Peabody Essex Museum Salem Witch Trials Collection / Examination Transcripts / Jailer’s Records / Petitions Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub Week 5 Course Work / The Thing About Salem / The Thing About Witch Hunts / The Thing About Witch Hunts & About Salem YouTube channel
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