"Nortan, with dazzling insight and astonishing meticulous and detective work, takes us well past the surface explorations of Salem Village quarrels into the deeply complex story of what happened and why. This is a brilliant book, wonderfully conceived and executed, and it gives reality to the expression 'a landmark achievement." -Bernard Rosenthal, author of Salem Story. This book was very informative and very detailed. You can tell just by reading this book that the author did a lot of research.…
In 1692 Salem, the town minister, Reverend Parris, discovers his niece Abigail and his daughter Betty dancing with a group of girls in the woods. Their “group leader” seemed to be his slave, Tituba. When Betty’s father sees her she faints and does not awaken for several days. Citizens of Salem reckon the girls were performing witchcraft. Crowds gather outside of the Reverend's house while he is trying to figure out what exactly happened that night.…
Today, being accused of witchcraft is as crazy as saying the Kardashians provide any real benefits to society, but in the Puritan society of New England in the 1600s, witchcraft was a perfectly logical explanation for strange or otherwise inexplicable events. Most likely if you ask someone about witch hunts in New England they will bring up naked girls dancing in the woods or accused witches being executed for their crimes by hanging at the gallows or being pressed by stones. This is only one view of the witch hunts in New England. Although it makes sense that the most extraordinary events would be the ones heavily documented and popularized, there are many other examples of witch hunts and trials that did not reach such fanatical levels.…
The Salem witchcrafts, consisted as multiple demonic spirits tortured a pure, God fearing soul, in retaliation to uneasy affairs with the servants’ guardian family. While reading Escaping Salem, I gathered that in this earlier century, England was known to be very traditional, family-oriented, and deeply invested in their Puritan religion, women were also considered a substitution for men, in terms of labor. Along with collecting information from online resources, about how these witch trials not only occurred in the 1600s, but also far thereafter, the book also provided examples of many witches, Elizabeth Seager, and Katherine Harrison; who escaped conviction, due to the lack of tangible evidence. One lenient evening in October 1692, was expected to progress routinely, until the moment Katherine Branch, a servant of the Wescot household, went out to fetch herbs, and returned in an altered mental state.…
Although the novel “Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem” by Rosalyn Schanzer is an informational text, it exhibits numerous qualities which can be found in literary works. First of all, a characteristic that sets this novel apart from most informational texts is its theme, which is the moral or lesson of the story. A theme is crucial to a literary work because it demonstrates a piece of knowledge that should be acquired after reading the story. Informational texts do not customarily contain themes, for they are written for the sole purpose of presenting information to the reader.…
The quaint town of Salem is found in Essex County, Massachusetts on the Northwest coast of the Naumkeag River. The town centre is an eight-acre common in Washington Square with a statue of the town founder. The square is “Surrounded by beautiful 18th-century mansions”, and other streets are aligned with historic buildings (OldSalem.com). Salem State College was started in 1954 but was originally founded as Salem Normal School and opened in 1854. During 1874, $25, 000 was anonymously donated to create the city’s first hospital which opened on October 1, 1874, and had only twelve beds.…
Hawthorne grew up with his mother by his side because his father died when Hawthorne was only four. He attended Bowdoin College and graduated in 1825, where he met and became close friends with future president Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne had been interested in reading and writing his whole life, he wrote before, during and after college. After graduating, he married Sophia Peabody in 1842, had three children and continued to write in Concord, Massachusetts. Hawthorne’s work “confronted reality”.…
Hawthorne expresses an indignant tone as he is for patronage but his community is not, he plays a position as “Surveyor of the Revenue” and believes man should present moral qualities and own up to their self-reliance instead of depending on the government to tell them what to do and what is best for them (27). Hawthorne compromises with “American” identity and likes the idea of “capability of self-support” and despises the way society prefers commercialism over individuality. Hawthorne appreciates the virtues of self-effort and perception. Hawthorne remarks how his writing career could not help out his family financially and how he began writing about the depravity of society and found the scarlet letter in the Salem House which encouraged him to write romance novels and depict how the Puritans were harshly treated in his times. Hawthorne was gratified by the Custom House because he found his character and writing style but always had repugnance against society and the way it plays its role in the…
1. How did the Salem witchcraft trials reflect attitudes toward women and the status of women in colonial New England? The Salem witchcraft trials, according to author Carol Karlsen, reflected attitudes towards the status of and attitudes towards women in Colonial New England. In these colonies, women were held in relatively high regard, but much was expected from them. Although families and wives were highly valued in the Puritan culture of New England, Puritanism reinforced the idea of almost total male authority.…
Salem In the late 16th century in the Massachusetts colony there was a town called Salem, this settlement was a puritan community. Salem is known for the great tragedy known as the Salem witch trials, where in mass hysteria n paranoia took the lives of many innocent people. Religion, war, and land in this region of America took and ruined the life’s of many settlers not only in Salem but in many parts of the New England area. These events are studied even to this day, they show us how hysteria can take hold of people and make them act irrational.…
Enlightenment and Ignorance: The Light, and Dark in our lives Light and dark are very vivid symbols in The Scarlet Letter. Light and dark shows the asymmetry in characters personalities, it shows depletion of intelligence in the people, lastly light epitomizes knowledge, and darkness is the ignorance that controls peoples’ actions: specifically the townspeople’s actions. Towards the beginning of the book Roger Chillingworth’s character is still undefined. He is very mysterious and has a shadow-like personality that no one can really read.…
Many think of alienation and isolation as very similar concepts, if not the same thing. The terms are commonly used interchangeably when describing one who is separated from society. However, alienation and isolation are two widely different concepts, as alienation is separation from society caused by others ' deliberate avoidance, by believing that they are foreign, while isolation is the conscious choice to stay aloof from society. The differences between the two concepts are revealed in Chapter Five of Nathaniel Hawthorne 's novel The Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne portrays Hester Prynne as a strong and charitable woman after committing a sin and being publicly punished for it. By portraying Hester as fallen and strong, Hawthorne describes…
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was written in a time when conformity was necessary for survival, while individuality was condemned. Those who conform to society do so because they fear being different and value being accepted. Those who choose not to conform, are often punished, whether that meaning literally or socially. Those who fear differences, humiliate and ridicule those who are different and use them to scare others to stick to the social norm. It is necessary for societies to possess strong individuals even though they struggle against it.…
Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem is a National Geographic book that gives an overview of the Salem Witch Trials from its start to its finish. The author, Rosalyn Schanzer, is complete in her telling of the events, starting from the point where no one guessed that the afflicted girls were being tortured by witches and ending with the stories of how each person lived out their lives after the trials ended. The drawback of recording over a year of time within 131 pages is that the information isn’t as in depth as possible, and though everything is touched on there are obvious focuses, such as the reverend, who appears on nearly twenty different pages, as opposed the the symptoms of the girls’ affliction which appeared on…
How does Hawthorne use Dimmesdale's character to help emphasize the hypocrisy of the puritan society? Puritan society of the 1800s saw the world in black and white, good or bad, right or wrong. In his novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Dimmesdale’s character, who is a minister in a puritan society, to highlight how this simplistic view of the world is full of hypocrisy. In a society that does not see people for the multiple dimensions they have, individuals are easily painted in a single dimension and expected to conform to society’s expectations or face the consequences of not complying.…