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Salem Obsessed; Or, Plus Ça Change: An Introduction
Jane Kamensky
| FOUR decades ago Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, a pair of fresh-faced assistant professors toiling away in the same department, worked up a seminar they called "New Approaches to the Study of History." Following a model of hands-on learning favored by Nissenbaum's mentors at the University of Wisconsin and borrowing something of the sleeves-rolled-up, hands-dirty ethos of an archaeological dig, they set out to "give undergraduate students the opportunity to explore a single event in depth through the careful and extended use of primary sources."1 The method—full immersion in the fast-flowing stream of history—was the point; the particular body of water into which these beginning students would be asked to jump was somewhat beside it. |
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Had Boyer and Nissenbaum set up shop in Detroit, or Los Angeles, or Miami, or Philadelphia, you would be reading a very different Forum.
But as it happened, they worked at the University of Massachusetts, in a state that was once a British colony whose English settlers—those pious, probing, persnickety Puritans—had been maniacally devoted record keepers; their memory had been so venerated by nineteenth-century descendants that a treasure trove of documents from the late seventeenth century had survived time's ravages, remaining close at hand. Tugged by the archive, Boyer and Nissenbaum decided to focus their class around the infamous 1692 Salem witch trials. |
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Salem's documentary corpus—much of it published, with more to be painstakingly discovered by the diligent young professors—was perfect for a student's deep, quick inquiry. The materials were plentiful yet bounded; counting the pages of legal documents, sermon notes, petitions, and church records doesn't take you much past the high three figures.
The texts were opaque enough to challenge yet forthcoming enough to tantalize. The story wasn't lying there in plain sight, prettied up and predigested, CliffsNotes style. ("The five leading causes of the Salem Witch Trials are...") But if you worked them over hard and thoughtfully, the bits and pieces of evidence might give up their secrets. And what secrets! Salem circa 1692 offered love and death, magic and murder, vengeance, regret, and forgiveness, not always in equal measure. Great mysteries of the human condition paraded across a tiny stage: a town of fewer than two thousand souls, a small, proud, largely vanished society whose traces could still be glimpsed and even felt, if dimly. Here, in short, was precisely the sort of laboratory that other new social historians (John Demos, Philip J. Greven, Kenneth Lockridge, and Michael Zuckerman foremost among them) had mined to brilliant effect, using small worlds to plumb big questions. |
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Boyer and Nissenbaum quickly realized that these fragments from Salem's past contained the making of a great course and more. The professors began, "after considerable deliberation and some reluctance," to sketch an article. Though neither was a colonial historian by training, the pair contemplated submitting an essay about their experiment and its results to the flagship journal in that field, none other than the William and Mary Quarterly. But the outline they "scribbled on a lunch bag one afternoon in September 1970" grew too big. The classroom collaboration would become instead a monograph of extraordinary complexity, grace, and longevity. (Now in its twenty-sixth printing from Harvard University Press, it has sold more than 180,000 copies over its life and is still going strong.) In their modest and generous response to the sometimes heated criticism their efforts receive in this Forum, Boyer and Nissenbaum recall that when they "finally completed Salem Possessed in late 1972 ... we knew we had written a good book." Perhaps even a definitive one, "the last word on Salem witchcraft."2 |
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