"Young Goodman Brown" is set in the town of Salem, Massachusetts during the Puritan era of the 1600s. The Puritans were known for their strict religious beliefs and strident moralism, and particularly for their belief that God doesn't reward people for good behavior on Earth but instead selects the people who will someday go to heaven before those people are even born. These heaven-bound Puritans are known as the "elect," and Puritans believed the elect could be identified by their moral purity on Earth. This notion created a culture of moral perfectionism among the Puritans, in which people tried to project their own unblemished virtue while thoroughly examining themselves and their peers for flaws that might indicate that they were destined for hell. "Young Goodman Brown" depicts the underbelly of such a culture, where there's no outlet for what Hawthorne sees as humankind's inherent tendency toward sin.
Another important aspect of "Young Goodman Brown" is the year in which it's set, which is never explicitly stated and cannot be definitively known. But Hawthorne does give readers some clues that point to the early 1690s, which is significant because the infamous Salem Witch Trials began in 1692. The major clue to the story's setting in time is the reference to Goodman Brown's father having fought in King Philip's war, which was a fight between various indigenous peoples of New England and the white colonists who were settling there. This war began in 1675, and if Goodman Brown's father was of fighting age then, his son would likely begin to be of marrying age in the early 1690s. But this story is likely not set after the Salem Witch Trials, since there's no reference to them in the story, despite the devil's clear interest in listing Puritan misdeeds. This means that the story's setting is Salem in the immediate leadup to the witch trials, making the story an examination of the kind of repressed and hysterical society that could accuse hundreds of innocent people of witchcraft, executing 19 of them.
