![]() ![]() By then, 19 innocent women and men had been hung and one man had been pressed to death by heavy stones.īut the trauma wrought by America’s very own “tiny reign of terror,” as Stacy Schiff describes the Salem witch trials in her new book The Witches: Salem, 1692, has no end in sight. When The Crucible debuted on Broadway in 1953, Arthur Miller famously declared, “Salem is one of the few dramas in history with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” It’s a catchy sound bite-but what is this “end” he talks about? The collective nightmare certainly began in January 1692, when nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams erupted in unstoppable spasms, barks, and twitches the middle of the drama reached a climax with the bodies that swung on Gallows Hill over that summer and the final act arrived with the last trials in the spring of 1693, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony snapped awake at last, delivering not-guilty verdicts to those still on trial and pardoning the rest. ![]()
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