-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 3
/
Copy pathsalempress99.html
120 lines (120 loc) · 6.29 KB
/
salempress99.html
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content=
"HTML Tidy for Windows (vers 14 February 2006), see www.w3.org" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFF0" text="#990066" link="#990066" vlink=
"#990066">
<basefont size="3" />
<center><img src="images/evenews.jpg" alt=
"Salem Evening News" /><br align="left" />
Thursday November 4<sup>th</sup>, 1999.<br />
<font size="small">©<a href=
"http://www.salemnews.com">www.salemnews.com</a>,
1999</font></center>
<hr width="50%" />
<center>
<h1>Documents shed new light on witchcraft trials</h1>
By Betsy Taylor<br> Originally published in the <a href="http://www.salemnews.com/">Salem Evening News</a><br> November 4, 1999</center>
<p>DANVERS - More than three centuries after the Salem witch
trials, scholars have discovered a handful of documents that reveal
the hysteria continued longer than previously thought and identify
a new man among those accused.</p>
<p>An international effort is underway to re-transcribe papers
relating to the witch hunts, with Danvers' town archivist Dick
Trask serving as an associate editor. That book, and one other,
will contain the new finds.</p>
<p>Scholars, by meticulously scouring archives this decade, have
quietly added about 3 percent more official documentation to the
collection relating to the 1692 proceedings, Trask said.</p>
<p>Witchcraft experts are particularly excited by discoveries of
the past year.</p>
<p>"I think all of them are valuable, and I think some of them are
pretty significant," said Bernard Rosenthal, a State University of
New York at Binghamton professor. "It gives fresh insight.''</p>
<p>Rosenthal is the editor of a project to compile all the witch
trial legal documentation into a new book.</p>
<p>When a group of girls and young women first accused townsfolk in
Salem and its environs of being witches in the 17th century, a
paper trail started which is still surfacing in the modern day.</p>
<p>One document, found within the past year, reveals that the zeal
of Salem witchcraft accusations went on longer than historians had
previously thought.</p>
<p>Even after the last of 19 hangings -- and after the governor had
ordered a stop to the witch proceedings -- one teenage girl who had
already accused 21 people of being witches continued to officially
make further accusations, scholars have found.</p>
<p>Another identifies a new man, Daniel Eames, as being among the
144 people formally arrested and charged with witchcraft.</p>
<p>"Now there's another name to add to the list of the accused at
Salem," said Cornell University American History Professor Mary
Beth Norton, who found those documents. She's working on her own
book about the witch trials.</p>
<p>She found four previously unknown manuscripts at the
Massachusetts Historical Society by searching through a
miscellaneous manuscripts file.</p>
<p><font size="+1"><strong>Hearing from the
accused</strong></font></p>
<p>In July, a University of Virginia professor Benjamin C. Ray came
across two newly discovered examinations, or written accounts, of
the questions asked of accused witches, which give gripping details
into two women's ordeals for the first time.</p>
<p>One of the accused, Mrs. Ann Dolliver, admits to making puppets
out of wax, but denies being a witch. Her accuser retorts that
Dolliver's specter said she wanted to kill her own father and
killed a little child.</p>
<p>In another newly found examination, a woman, Mary Ireson, stands
stunned in the courtroom, her "eyes being fixed," after one of her
accusers says Ireson's spirit threatened to tear out her accuser's
throat if she did not become a witch by signing her name in the
Devil's book.</p>
<p>"We never heard their voices before. This gives us a little more
of the picture," said Ray. He's working on an interactive
Witchcraft Web site. He found Dolliver and Ireson's examinations
during his research at the Boston Public Library.</p>
<p>Both professors said their finds were not due to poor archiving,
rather the result of thorough, directed research.</p>
<p>They've shared their discoveries with other scholars but have
just gone public with the finds. The newly found documents will
likely be included in a new volume, a re-transcribed and
chronologically arranged collection of Salem witchcraft trial
documents.</p>
<p>Over the past few years, these four witchcraft scholars,
researching separately but updating one another on their efforts,
have found about 3 percent more documentation to add to the
approximately 850 known Salem witch trial records, explained Trask,
the Danvers town archivist, historian and writer.</p>
<p>He's one of those who have made discoveries during recent
years.</p>
<p>The town of Danvers was known as Salem Village in the 17th
century, its archives are one of the sites where some of the
historic documents are stored.</p>
<p>Trask found 19 documents, which he published as part of his 1997
book. Rosenthal found one, which he printed in his 1993 book.</p>
<p>The most recent attempt to transcribe all the documents occurred
in the 1930s as part of a Work Projects Administration program when
people were put to work during the Great Depression. It was
published in 1977 but scholars said mistakes need to be corrected
and new finds added.</p>
<p>This new edition of the Salem witch trial documents is scheduled
to be published by Cambridge University Press in a few years.
Norton is writing her own book, "In the Devil's Snare," which
focuses more on the accusers and why the authorities were willing
to listen to them.</p>
<p>As a Colonial history professor, Norton said them are three
places in 17th century American history that people particularly
recall: Plymouth, Jamestown, and Salem.</p>
<p>She said the phrase Salem Witch Trial still resonates with
Americans, and the fascination with the trials remains. "I think
everybody's interested in Salem," she said.</p>
<p>Ray said he thinks people will continue to be interested,
seeking answers to their own questions about the trials. "We keep
returning to it." he noted. "Its something we're not satisfied that
we understand."</p>
<hr width="50%" />
<p>© 1999, Salem Evening News</p>
</body>
</html>