Volume 39, Number 10 · May 28, 1992
Beat the Devil
By Edmund S. Morgan
The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
by Richard Godbeer
Cambridge University Press, 253 pp., $24.95
The three hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch trials of 1692 comes at a time when witchcraft commands a scholarly attention that would have been puzzling in 1892 or even in 1792. In 1792 witchcraft was still widely practiced and feared, but it no longer held the attention of the educated elite in either Europe or America. The men who drafted the United States Constitution in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 took no notice of a mob that carted and killed a witch in the streets outside their windows. The event was reported in a single paragraph of all the Philadelphia newspapers, but none of the Founding Fathers thought it worth mentioning in any surviving diary or correspondence. It was the kind of thing to be expected among the benighted classes who had not yet benefited from the educational opportunities that the new republic would surely bring.
Review, 2835 words
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