The Specter of Salem

"During the 1950s, as critics labeled Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign a "witch hunt," Broadway's The Crucible similarly underscored links between cold war political investigations and the 1692 Salem witch trials. The Specter of Salem reveals that this twentieth-century cultural moment, often cited as marking the emergence of mainstream Salem evocations, actually followed a long and colorful history of appeals to American memories of the witch trials." "From the American Revolution through the nineteenth century, Gretchen Adams demonstrates, this collective memory loomed large in public life. Schoolbooks in the 1790s, for example, invoked the episode to demonstrate the new nation's progress from a disorderly and brutal past to a rational present. Later, in the 1830s, critics of new religious movements cast them as a return to Salem-era fanaticism. And during the Civil War, Southern writers and politicians concocted images of witches burning in seventeenth-century Salem to critique what they saw as the North's savage extremism. Shedding new light on the many episodes in which Americans have invoked Salem to represent real or imagined threats to a progressive and rational society, Adams ultimately illuminates the function of collective memories in the life of a nation."--BOOK JACKET.

Gretchen A. Adams is assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University.