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Historical In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crsis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton $30.00 / Knopf / 2002 Struggling to survive in a vast and often unforgiving land, early Puritan settlers in 17th-century New England believed themselves to be surrounded by an inscrutable universe filled with invisible spirits. In an attempt to make sense of the unknown, they believed that everything from a bountiful harvest to hail was the work of evil spirits punishing them for their sins or the manifestation of God's pleasure in their goodness. Nothing about the initial afflictions and accusations of witchcraft in Essex County, MA in 1692 distinguished them from previous incidents in England and New England. Highly unusual, however, was the tragic proportion of the hysteria and violence that followed, when approximately 150 people were charged with consorting with the Devil. More than 50 residents of Salem and its surrounding villages were made to confess that they were witches, 14 women and five men were hanged, and another man was crushed to death with stones in an attempt to force him to enter a plea. Beginning several years earlier than most accounts, Salem historian Mary Beth Norton painstakingly reconstructs the complex social, political, military, and religious factors that created the context for the notorious trials. Norton connects a large number of the key parties of the Salem trials directly to the war-torn frontier colonies of Maine and New Hampshire, where settlers were regularly massacred by the Wabanaki Indians. Many of the accused, accusers, and judges were refugees from the ravaged frontier, had lost loved ones there, or had fought in unsuccessful military campaigns against the Indians and their French allies. Norton assigns central importance for the extent of the witchcraft crisis to the climate of fear and uncertainty created by the huge losses of property, territory, and life that the colonists suffered in the Indian wars. In the Devil's Snare is a stark and substantive assemblage of facts that occasionally grows tedious with names, details, and flashbacks that interrupt the narrative. It is, nonetheless, a compelling argument that the combination of the colonists' religious ideology and need to account for their military failures-and the ongoing threat on the frontier-precipitated the Salem witchcraft crisis. --Judith Kane

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