Historian Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, provides a unique account of the events at Salem using a seventeenth-century perspective to describe the mass hysteria, as well as examining critical turning points from the trials. Norton’s premise focuses more on political and military history and less on social history. Her argument, that the Salem witch trials cannot be studied without extensive reference to the ongoing wars between the settlers and the Indian population of New England - particularly the Wabanaki tribe of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, is a far different perspective than what is commonly written about the Salem witch trials.
Norton draws connections between the Indian wars and the effect they had on many of the significant players in the trials. She depicts social…show more content… Her detailed account describes the town, which was burned and pillaged, the killing of 50 people, and the apprehension of an additional 100 people. Norton then describes a dramatically different scene which took place a week before the attack on York where two young daughters of a pastor in Salem Village began to have strange fits and visions. This was the start of the hysteria that would soon follow just months later, where over 140 men, women, and children in Salem would be accused of witchcraft or an allegiance with the devil. Norton is a strong proponent that the two events were connected, and provides persistence, intuition, and meticulous persuasiveness in her writing. She also provides evidence that many of the accused, as well as accusers, were refugees from the Indian Wars. Norton admits that the reasons for the young sisters’ fits may be mysterious, but the convergence of fears about living among the devil, especially those who bore witness to the Indian violence, were at the heart of the witch
