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July 19, 1692: Rebecca Nurse
In 1692, nearly two dozen people were put to death in Salem, Massachusetts, for the crime of witchcraft. One of them, Rebecca Nurse, was hanged on July 19. Rebecca was born the daughter of William Towne and his wife Joanna Blessing Towne, in 1621. As a teenager, her parents relocated from Yarmouth, England, to the village of Salem, Massachussetts. When Rebecca was about 24, she married Frances Nurse, who made trays and other wooden household items. Frances and Rebecca had four sons and four daughters together. The Nurse family lived on a tract of land owned by the Putnam family, and they had been involved in a number of nasty land…
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Witch Trials: Beyond Salem
I first became interested in the Salem witch trials long before I was interested in witchcraft itself. I remember reading about them as a child, and being fascinated by the tales of these girls my own age who had been possessed, taken by spirits in the night in league with the Devil himself. Accusations flew about like gray specters in the dark nights of colonial Massachusetts, fingers pointing, and no one was safe. As I got older, and became more interested in history itself — not just of Salem and its trials, but of the entire country and in particular, the pre-Revolutionary American world — I read more and learned…
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No, Salem Ancestry Doesn’t Make You Special
A reader says, “I just found out that I’m descended from one of the witches from the Salem witch trials and I feel like this makes me have witchcraft in my blood. I went to a Pagan event not too long ago, and when I told everyone about this they acted like it was no big deal. I feel like I deserve a little more respect since my ancestors were Salem witches.” I know it’s very exciting to discover that your ancestry contains people who were interesting, or even famous. And sometimes, when we make a discovery like that, we want to share it with others, and we want them…
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By Sorcery, Charm, or Enchantment
As many of you know, I recently graduated from Ohio University with my B.A. in History. One of my required courses was a Historical Research and Writing class, and it was awesome. After all, it combined three of my favorite things: history, research, and makin’ words! My professor, Dr. Mark Nevin, was fantastic, and over the course of 14 weeks, we each developed a thesis, pored over acres and acres of primary and secondary sources, and finally presented an academic research paper in which we supported our thesis argument with all of the evidence we could find.
