Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum

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Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum | Salem Possessed in Retrospect | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Salem Possessed in Retrospect

Here are but 2 parties in the World, the Lamb & his Followers, & the Dragon & his Followers: & these are contrary one to the other ... Here are no Newters. Every one is on one side or the other.

—Samuel Parris¹

IT is now forty years after we began planning the experimental history course at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that in turn led to Salem Possessed. We find it an interesting experience to collaborate again as we reflect on that book and its context and on the Salem witchcraft scholarship that has appeared in the intervening decades, including the essays in the present Forum. There is a certain appropriateness in this essay appearing in the William and Mary Quarterly, since our initial plan, when we first envisioned writing about this topic, was to submit an article to this journal. Only gradually did the planned article evolve into a book-length project. So here we are now, both retired, finally writing that long-delayed WMQ essay first envisioned near the beginning of our careers.

The experimental history course, which we called "New Approaches to the Study of History," came first. We jointly introduced it in 1969. (This course, in turn, emerged from the earlier pedagogical experiments of two historians with whom Stephen Nissenbaum had studied as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin: Stanley Katz and William R. Taylor.) Our aim was to engage beginning undergraduates in actual historical research, devoting an entire semester to the intensive study of a single historical episode and for the most part limiting our students to reading raw—uninterpreted—primary sources. We used the Salem witchcraft trials as our episode. As the two of us spent the summer of 1969 preparing a variety of documents for our students, we came across some unfamiliar published sources that had not been used by scholars. These sources, first published in the 1910s and 1920s, included the records of the Essex County Quarterly Court and the Probate Court (up to the early 1680s) and the Salem Village Book of Record from the period 1672–97. This latter source contained a clear and vivid record of factional conflict in Salem Village, which had festered during the two decades preceding the witchcraft trials. In addition it contained the various tax lists that would later prove helpful as we formulated our understanding of the deeper sources of the village's factional divisions.

As the semester progressed, we began, as a further experiment, to drive across Massachusetts to the Essex County courthouse in Salem, taking several of our more eager students with us, to examine and transcribe the land transactions and unpublished probate records of those individuals who were now coming to seem especially significant. Then, in the summer of 1970, acting on a hunch, the two of us tracked down the early manuscript records of the Salem Village church, written down from 1689 to 1696 in the meticulous hand of its first minister, Samuel Parris. These records were located in the most obvious of places: the First Church of Danvers, the very church, though not the same building, in which Parris had ministered. Included in these records, to our astonishment and gratification, were the two crucial petitions—one in opposition to Parris, the other in support—that the minister himself had copied out, along with the names of every villager who had signed one or the other.

We and our graduate teaching assistants transcribed and typed out this new material to make it available in the fall of 1970 to the growing number of students who enrolled for our Salem course the second time we offered it. We also contracted to have the documents published so that other teachers might use them.² Having done so, it occurred to us that one of those other teachers might decide to write an essay based on "our" documents! Early that same fall, after considerable deliberation and some reluctance (each of us had other scholarly projects underway), we made the decision to write the essay that, once completed, we planned to submit to the William and Mary Quarterly.

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