Escaping Salem Study Guide

Dr. Richard Godbeer is the Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of History and the Director of the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas. Dr. Godbeer received his BA form Oxford University in 1984 and his PhD from Brandeis University in 1989. He has held teaching positions at the University of California Riverside, the University of Miami, and Virginia Commonwealth University. As a historian of witchcraft, religion, gender, and sexuality in early America, Godbeer has written six books, including The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England, The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents, and Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692.

Though Escaping Salem focuses on a series of witch trials that took place in Stamford, Connecticut in the summer of 1692, Richard Godbeer contextualizes the fear that swept through Stamford within the larger background of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts. These trials—the most famous witch trials in American history—took place from February of 1692 all the way through May of 1693. Over 200 people (mostly women) were accused of witchcraft. Of those, 30 were found guilty; 14 women and 5 men were executed by hanging. The mass panic that swept through New England’s tight-knit and deeply religious Puritan communities shattered the Puritans’ burgeoning theocracy in early America and revealed the power of fear to divide communities forever. Though the Stamford trials took place on a much smaller scale than the neighboring Salem trials, the fact that the mass hysteria of the “witch hunt” spread throughout New England in a few months demonstrates the power of groupthink and the fragility of a society founded upon strict social roles, gender norms, and religious doctrine.

The Salem witch trials have captured the American imagination for centuries. Many fiction and nonfiction titles seek to explore the driving forces behind the trials, as well as how those same forces of fear, othering, sexism, and religious extremism have lingered in American society in the many years since. Marilynne Roach’s Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials seeks to contextualize, demystify, and humanize the players involved in the trials. Historian Elizabeth Reis’s Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England takes a broader view of Puritan communities in early America, examining the social structures that bred the suspicion, fear, and distrust that fueled 17th-century witch trials throughout New England. Dramas inspired by the intrigue and brutality of the Salem witch trials include Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom.