Notes
Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched -- at a politically tumultuous time -- on the edge of what a visitor termed a 'remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness.' With devastating clarity, the textures and tensions of a colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness.
