Ten years ago, I spent a lot of time on Salem in the undergraduate survey. In part, this was self serving. I was a religious historian and the witch trials were a moment where I could harp on the importance of religion – how colonial New Englanders saw themselves living amid wonders, enchantments, and judgments (as historian David Hall so beautifully wrote about in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment). In part, this was because I focused far more on how people experienced their lives in the past than on what caused events like the writing of the Constitution.

And wow, if ever there was a moment in colonial America that was a good place to stop and ponder, Salem is it. Take, for instance, the source material (here’s one site with tons of materials). There’s tons of it and so much of it has been digitized. We have court proceedings where women speak, where servant-slaves speak, where colonial elites and everyday people go back and forth. And not just one person (as in the case of Anne Hutchinson) … lots of women and men.

My favorite, and probably for many of you, is Tituba. There is so much that’s fascinating about her story, and I highly recommend Elaine Breslaw’s book on her. We can read her testimony, where the devil appears to her. The devil seems to act like a white master: he threatens her with physical and spiritual harm; then he tantalizes her with temptations of nice and pretty things. So students can read her testimony to understand her imagined world. But then we can ask some other questions. How do we explain a moment when colonial authorities were looking to Tituba for answers and aid? How do we explain that Tituba was not executed at Salem? She lived on even though she claimed direct encounters with the dark side. And then, how do we explain representations of her in American art that shifted in presenting her as Indian-looking to more and more African? Students could trace how Tituba was represented over time. (this, it seems to me, is part of the story of how Americans in the twentieth century remembered slavery as only a history of African Americans and forgot the history of Indian enslavement – a point Rebecca Goetz made last week).

For students who might be studying for a Monday quiz, they may want to consider the testimony of Tituba in Major Problems; they may want to think about the differences between how David Hall describes colonial New England, and how T. H. Breen does; an A student may consider Anne Bradstreet’s concerns for her children in her 1656 poem, and how Alexander Hamilton described the material possessions of those in the colonies.

And finally, Professor Schultz asked how do I account for the Salem outbreak. To be straightforward, I don’t. I leave it as a mystery for my students – that the beauty of history is that our arguments about causation are educated, informed, thought-out, refined-by-debate arguments … but they are nonetheless arguments. I’m just waiting for some fiction writer (if he or she hasn’t already) to put together something on vampires at Salem. If Abraham Lincoln was actually a vampire hunter, I’m not sure why Cotton Mather wasn’t too.