Stretching from Martha’s Vineyard to Nova Scotia and incorporating parts of present-day Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine, it perched on the edge of a wilderness.

New England delivered greater purity but also introduced fresh perils. Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence. On a providential mission, they hoped to begin history anew they had the advantage of building a civilization from scratch. Having suffered for their faith, they had sailed to North America to worship “with more purity and less peril than they could do in the country where they were,” as a clergyman at the center of the crisis later explained. The population of New England at that time would fit into Yankee Stadium today. One minister discovered that he was related to no fewer than twenty witches. Husbands implicated wives nephews their aunts daughters their mothers siblings each other. The youngest was five the eldest nearly eighty. Although we will never know the exact number of those formally charged with having “wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously” engaged in sorcery, somewhere between a hundred and forty-four and a hundred and eighty-five witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns. The first hanging took place in June, the last in September a stark, stunned silence followed. In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft.

Illustration by Thomas Allen Source: Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum (document) “Where will the Devil show most malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?” Cotton Mather wrote.

Stacy schiff the witches review