12 March 2013

In Search of History: Salem Witch Trials

This week I decided to watch In Search of History: Salem Witch Trials. I don't have cable in my house so I used my Netflixs to look up history shows and I found this one the most interesting. I have always heard about the Salem Witch Trials, and how so many innocent people where killed but I never knew exactly what happened and the details about what happened. This program did an amazing job on teaching and telling the story of the Salem Witch Trials. It started with the first accounts of reported witchcraft back in england and gave some great back ground information. Then it moved its focus to the main story of Salem in the new world. It talked about how the people who lived in Salem were Puritans and watched to start a community where church and state were fully connected, and they did.
People have been accusing people of being witches for over 300 years before the Salem Witch Trials. A book was published called the Maleficarvm " the Witches Hammer" and this book told you how to investigate and prove that people where practicing and committing witchcraft.

In the winter of 1691 to 1692 the Salem Witch trails began. One of the family's had a salve named Tatchuba and she was from Jamaica and one nigh started to tell these girls about magic and showed them some tricks. The girls knew this was bad but didn't tell anybody about and a few more girls joined and there were 12-20 total. The girls started to act bizzar and started to tell people that there where witches in the town. They started to accuse the poor and people who didn't go to church.
The girls started to use spectral evidence to prove these women where witches and that has never been used before.  By June the girls had accused over 100 people of  being witches. Only 55 people confessed to being a witch and by confessing it saved their life's. Once the girls started to accuse people of higher class of being witches the judges began to rethink what they were doing and who they were accusing. They decided not to use spectral evidence to accuse people anymore.

500 documents survived from the Salem Witch Trials with 160 cases. This documentary did a great job with giving credible information from the accounts. The strengths of this documentary had to be the   primary sources from the actual event with secondary sources from the event. There have been books written about the event as well. John Hale, one of the accused, wrote a book called "The Modest Enquiry into the Nature of the Witch" which have first had accounts on what happened. I know that this documentary had valid information because the trails happened a few hundred years ago and we still have a lot of documents from the actual even. One of the biggest positive outcomes from the Salem Witch Trials is that it formed how we tri people now in courts with you are innocent until you are proven guilty, I thought that was way cool because I never knew that law came from the Salem Witch Trials.

No comments:

Post a Comment