Content area
Full Text
The Salem witch trials of 1692 have become a prominent Mature of the American cultural consciousness. This is due largely to Nathaniel Hawthorne's fictional works, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), and also some popular nonfiction books, like Marion Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts (1949) as well as more scholarly works, principally Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed (1974) and Carol Karlsen's Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987).
The witch trials are often taken as a lens to view the whole Puritan period in New England and to serve as an example of religious prejudice, social persecution, and superstition. While each of these views is appropriate, the words and deeds of the actual people involved have generally been passed over because the original court records have not been readily available. Thus the witchcraft episode is often reduced to an irrational social aberration or the result of ergot food poisoning, a disease caused by moldy rye or other cereals, and the people involved are reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes.
This lesson plan emphasizes two things: using primary source documents to analyze the seventeenth-century court records of the witch trials; and using artistic interpretations to analyze the ways in which the witchcraft episode has been represented by later generations in images.
Time
This lesson plan is in two parts and will hopefully be completed in two or three class meetings.
National Standards
This lesson plan addresses National Standards 2 and 3 in Standards in Historical Thinking by asking students to look at both primary sources and images used to represent the Salem Witchcraft trials to later generations. It also fulfills the standards in 1B Era 2: "demonstrate understanding of family life, gender roles, and women's rights in colonial North America."
Part I
The purpose of the first part of this lesson is to engage students in thinking about primary sources by asking them to look carefully at what people actually said in the records of the courtroom scenes. While attention often focuses on Judge Hathorne and the "afflicted" girls, the wonderful thing about the court records is that they recorded the voices of the accused and conveyed their own words of defense, their occasional laughter, frequent outbursts of sarcasm, their bewilderment and incredulity, and, above all...