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Providential explanations for "notable happenings" in Puritan history, such as cases of Indian captivity, shipwreck, natural disaster, & diabolic manifestations, possessions, & witchcraft. Essential to an understanding of Puritan society & culture in colonial America. The Essay is also one of America's earliest scientific works. Mather, shortly to become President of Harvard College, discusses magnetism, earthquakes, & medicine, with specific examples drawn from the New England experience, as in other accounts of the period, but differing from them in his "more scientific method, & in the devotion of some space to the exploding of superstition & the treatment of purely scientific subjects" (DAB). The book is still eminently & entirely readable, its vigorous & colloquial prose constantly equal to its extraordinary content.
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Against the backdrop of a Puritan theocracy threatened by change, in a population terrified not only of eternal damnation but of the earthly dangers of Indian massacres and recurrent smallpox epidemics, a small group of girls denounces a black slave and others as worshipers of Satan. Within two years, twenty men and women are hanged or pressed to death and over a hundred others imprisoned and impoverished. In The Salem Witch Trials Reader, Frances Hill provides and astutely comments upon the actual documents from the trial--examinations of suspected witches, eyewitness accounts of "Satanic influence," as well as the testimony of those who retained their reason and defied the madness. Always drawing on firsthand documents, she illustrates the historical background to the witchhunt and shows how the trials have been represented, and sometimes distorted, by historians--and how they have fired the imaginations of poets, playwrights, and novelists. For those fascinated by the Salem witch trials, this is compelling reading and the sourcebook.