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What Goes Around Comes Around
John Demos
| PAUL Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed was, and remains, a landmark in early American historical studies.1 The chance to salute it here is welcome. |
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Its very making was extraordinary. Consider ... It was the product of genuine collaboration (a rare occurrence among professional historians). Both its authors' areas of expertise lay outside the colonial period. It was conceived and developed as part of undergraduate teaching. And students contributed in significant ways to the research behind it. |
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Its importance for scholarship seems no less clear. Indeed its timing—publication in 1974—was impeccable. The foundations of a new social history had been laid some ten years earlier, and the edifice was still building. But to that point the new work had been focused on one or another kind of measurement and largely framed as community studies with much emphasis on social boundaries and structures, demographic rates, household and family systems, prevalent styles of mentality, and the like. What had not yet been accomplished or even (for the most part) attempted was the resolution of specific, eventcentered historical problems. In that regard Salem Possessed proved an absolute breakthrough. Certainly, it was event centered. (It helped that the event in question was old and endlessly intriguing, indeed among the oldest of all old chestnuts in the entire landscape of American history.) Now the new approach, these new methods and concepts, could be seen fully applied as means to the end of explanation. Hence the book might stand as a kind of capstone on a large and broadly influential scholarly enterprise. |
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For this reason it has endured through more than three decades, and for other reasons as well. Its architecture, the arrangement of its various parts, was nothing less than elegant. Likewise its prose qualities: elegant for sure, also arresting, nuanced, with fast (but not too fast) pace, and richly resonant tone. (The metaphor of a "lightning flash," dropped strategically into the preface to identify both the book's method and its result, was an especially fine authorial stroke.2 And there were other, similar strokes scattered throughout.) Which is almost to say that Salem Possessed succeeded on aesthetic grounds alone, never mind its substantive contents. |
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The Forum essays are not, to be sure, concerned with aesthetics. Instead they mount a detailed, empirical challenge to some (far from all) of the book's leading contentions. To wit: a map designed to show patterns of accusation and defense in the witch trials contains many inaccuracies and must be "corrected." Moreover a set of tables, based on local tax assessments, is insufficiently developed and contextualized and thus misrepresents the actual economic profile of Salem residents at the time of the trials.3 These are possibly valid criticisms (to which I will return). But there is much more to Salem Possessed than a single map and set of tables. Three powerfully constructed chapters trace a history of village conflict that, even if it were found not to reflect property differences, was surely central to the witch hunt. From there the spotlight moves to a pair of leading families, the Porters and the Putnams, with their various clashing interests brilliantly exposed, and then to a further, still deeper discussion of conflict internal to the Putnam clan. The final step in this zoom-lens sequence is a superbly insightful essay on the life and psychology of the Reverend Samuel Parris. It is, finally, the convergence of theme and content—as seen from all these different vantage points—that makes the book's underlying argument so compelling. |
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