The Salem Witch trials occupy a large space in the American imagination. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Hocus Pocus, Arthur Miller to American Horror Story, American pop culture is saturated in retellings of this horrifying episode in colonial history. It is easy to feel like we’ve long known everything there is to know about it.
But over the last 10 years, historians have been hard at work reexamining the documentary evidence of the trials. While I was researching the event for my new unit of Women and the American Story , Settler Colonialism to Revolution, 1692-1783 (debuting November 5), I learned a number of fascinating new facts that have recontextualized how I teach this history.
Nearly everything we think we know about Tituba is wrong.
The figure of Tituba looms large in the story of the Salem Witch trials. In the popular narrative of the trials, she is the black woman enslaved by Rev. Samuel Parris. Her stories of African magic and mythology plant the idea of witchcraft in the impressionable minds of Parris’s young daughter and niece. In some retellings, Tituba actually performs small acts of magic for the girls to entertain them on long winter evenings.
The actual Tituba bore no resemblance to this popular construction. In fact, Tituba was a Native woman, not black. Every existing historical account of the trials refers to her as a Native woman, and it was not until the 19th century that she was reinvented. It is important to correct this misidentification, because the myth that she was black perpetuates the erasure of Native enslavement in the New England colonies.
Tituba did belong to the Parris household, but there is no evidence that she told stories or performed magic for the household’s young women. This was another 19th-century fabrication to enliven the story. Tituba was the first woman to confess to practicing witchcraft in Salem, and her graphic confession was the spark that lit the flames of the hysteria. But later in her life, Tituba revealed that she had confessed only because Parris beat her until she agreed to do as he said.
The wide disparity between the life of the real Tituba and the mythology that has grown up around her is a useful example of how popular depictions of historical events can become distorted over time. For Settler Colonialism to Revolution, 1692-1783, I wrote a new biography of Tituba that takes current historical thinking into account (also available November 5, like the unit!). Asking students to compare the factual history of Tituba with popular depictions teaches a valuable lesson about taking all popular depictions of history with a grain of salt, and the importance of always returning to the source.
The Salem witch hysteria was not an isolated incident.
A lot of the conversation around the Salem Witch Trials is centered around figuring out how such a hysteria could have happened in the first place. Was it boredom? Cold weather? Ergot poisoning?
The trouble is, most of these theories treat the Salem hysteria as an isolated incident, when in fact it was one episode of a much larger trend that swept both Europe and the American colonies. Witch trials and executions took place in Europe from the mid-1500s, and what happened in Salem was not even the first large-scale panic in the Americas. Eleven accused witches were executed in Connecticut between 1647 and 1697 and 10 were executed in Bermuda between 1651 and 1655. Although these other such hysterias did not unfold as rapidly as the Salem witch trials, their existence indicates that Salem was not a one-time fluke. They were part of the larger European cultural landscape, and the causes were probably not so simple as a case of bad grain. Which brings us to our final point…
There were other colonial hysterias.
Only 49 years after the outbreak of the Salem witch hysteria, the people of New York City panicked over rumors of a possible slave uprising. Hundreds of men and women were arrested on hearsay evidence given by other accused conspirators, and before the end of summer 1741, thirty-four people had been executed and seventy enslaved people had been deported to the Caribbean colonies. The parallels to Salem witch trials are startling, and that isn’t just historical hindsight talking: at the height of the trials New York governor Cadwallader Colden received an anonymous letter urging him to reflect on the Salem Witch Trials and put an end to the current madness. To read an account of a black woman’s experience of these events, check out Settler Colonialism and Revolution, 1692-1783 when it goes live on November 5.
The comparisons between these two events offer tantalizing possibilities for further research and debate. What was it about life in Europe and the American colonies that spawned these kinds of crises? Was this happening on other continents or in other cultures? Have humans moved past this kind of madness, or have we simply evolved our responses to match the world we live in?
Overall, my research into the Salem witch trials reinforced that it is our job as educators to be sure we are staying abreast of the most recent developments in historical research, and to make sure we aren’t perpetuating the inaccuracies of popular culture served up as history. The truth is always more interesting than fiction, and it’s a lot more fun to learn the facts for yourself.
Written by Allyson Schettino, Associate Director of School Programs, New-York Historical Society