An earlier version of this article was presented at the joint conference of the Southeastern Medieval Association and the Texas Medieval Association, Waco, Texas, October 3–6, 1996. I thank Donald J. Kagay of the Texas Medieval Association for inviting me to participate in “The End of the World” panel at this conference. I also thank Dr. Duncan J. Richter of the Virginia Military Institute for his comments on an earlier draft of this article. Professor Robert J. LaSota of Salem State College and the staff of the Salem Public Library provided invaluable assistance.

1. Cohn, Norman, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 228Google Scholar. To the many 20th-century American millennial movements examined by Boyer, Paul in his study, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, we may now add Salem's tercentenary of the witch trials of 1692.

2. In 1992, the millennial agency discussed in this essay, the Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee, received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (“Witch Trials Memorial Awarded $10G,” Salem Evening New, 06 12, 1992, 11Google Scholar).

3. Final Report of the 1692–1992 Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee, prepared by D'Amario, Alison and McConchie, Linda (Salem: n.p., 1993), 3, 23Google Scholar.

4. Foundation inscription of the Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial. For the text of this inscription, see Appendix 1.

5. Final Report, 6Google Scholar.

6. “Invitation to the presentation of the 1994 Salem Award to Deputy Superintendent William Johnson, Boston Police Department, Thursday, March 23, 1995, Salem State College Auditorium, Lafayette Street, Salem, MA, Keynote Address by Terry Anderson.”

7. With the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs over the past several decades, Salem now looks to tourism to boost its sagging economy (Benton, Nelson K. III, “Manufacturing on Wane, Salem Must Depend on Tourism Industry,” Salem Evening News, 06 30, 1994, 4Google Scholar). Faced with a diminishing tax base, the city of Salem and the Tercentenary Committee aimed to increase city coffers by pulling in revenue from tourism generated by the tercentenary commemoration (“Tercentenary Committee Head: Witch Trials a Real-life Drama,” Salem Evening News, 02 22, 1991, 11Google Scholar; “City Puts Up $15G for Tourism Ads,” Salem Evening News, 02 3, 1992, 9Google Scholar; McCabe, Kathy, “Salem Tourism Is Still Under the ‘Witch City’ Spell,” Boston Globe, 03 1, 1992Google Scholar). “The tercentenary commemoration,” according to Salem's Mayor Neil J. Harrington, “enabled us to tap Salem's enormous potential for economic growth. We can continue to build on this success in ways that will broaden the benefits of increased visitors to businesses that are directly and indirectly related to the tourism industry” (Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee, Press release, October 15, 1992). The Final Report of the 1692–1992 Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee declared that “the Tercentenary events of 1992 … made a dramatic impact on Salem's economic growth. The Committee's efforts attracted worldwide media attention resulting in over 3,000 print and broadcast media pieces on subjects ranging from the history of the Trials themselves to civil rights issues of the 20th century. Over one million people visited Salem during the Tercentenary year” (3).

8. Sources supporting an assessment of individual blame include “The Return of Several Ministers,” in Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England, ed. Boyer, Paul and Nissenbaum, Stephen (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1972), 117–18Google Scholar; “Letter of Thomas Brattle, F.R.S., 1692,” in Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases 1648–1706, ed. Burr, George Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914), 165–90Google Scholar; the public apology of Samuel Sewall, in Sewall, Samuel, The Diary of Samuel Sewall 1674–1729, ed. Thomas, M. Halsey, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 1: 366–67Google Scholar; the acknowledgment of “Guilt of Innocent Blood” by twelve jurors, in Calef, Robert, “More Wonders of the Invisible World,” in Burr, , Narratives, 387–88Google Scholar; and Hutchinson, Thomas's account of the Salem episode in his 1764 publication, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Mayo, Lawrence Shaw, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 9–47.Google Scholar

9. These diverse interpretations may be found in Upham, Charles W., Salem Witchcraft; with An Account of Salem Village, and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects, 2 vols. (Boston: Wiggins and Lunt, 1867)Google Scholar; Bancroft, George, History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent, rev. ed., vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1876)Google Scholar; Poole, William L., “Witchcraft in Boston,” in The Memorial History of Boston, ed. Winsor, Justin, vol. 2 (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), 131–72Google Scholar; Nevins, Winfield S., Witchcraft in Salem Village in 1692 (Boston: Lea and Shepard, 1892)Google Scholar; Fiske, John, New France and New England (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1902)Google Scholar; Adams, Brooks, The Emancipation of Massachusetts: The Dream and Reality, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1919)Google Scholar; Parrington, Vernon Louis, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927)Google Scholar; Kittredge, George Lyman, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, 2d ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Starkey, Marion L., The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950)Google Scholar; and Hansen, Chadwick, Witchcraft at Salem (New York: George Braziller, 1969)Google Scholar.

10. Demos, John Putnam, “Underlying Themes in the Witchcraft of Seventeenth-Century New England,” American Historical Review 75 (06 1970): 1311–26CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Demos eliminated culpability (a) by severing all connections between historical causality and human responsibility, and (b) by invalidating attempts to assess the extent to which human agency is responsible for historical events. Demos responded in his article to the summons made in 1957 by the president of the American Historical Association, William L. Langer, to consider “irrational factors in human development” as the “next assignment” of the historical profession, rather than restricting history to “recorded fact and to strictly rational motivations” (Langer, William L., “The Next Assignment,” American Historical Review 63 [01 1958]: 283–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Demos accepted Langer's binary conception of historical causality, which applied a yin-yang polarity to historical events and regarded all events as resulting either from conscious motivation and intellectual design or from uncon scious motivation and irrational forces. Neither Langer nor Demos considered the possibility that perfectly rational beings might unleash irrational forces to serve rational ends, or that a government might act in a seemingly irrational fashion to serve the conscious aims of rational authorities. Demos is a direct descendant of the Putnam family of Salem Village, whose members in 1692 “spurred the prosecution [of those accused of witchcraft] beyond all others” (Demos, John Putnam, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England [New York: Oxford University Press, 1982], xGoogle Scholar). Demos hoped that his study of witchcraft in New England “would have an aspect of personal closure — even perhaps, of exorcism” -with respect to the past deeds of the Putnams (Demos, , Entertaining Satan, xGoogle Scholar). Demos's scholarship cannot be separated from his family ties. A desire to defend the reputations of his ancestors may explain his aversion to affixing individual blame for the wrongs committed in 1692.

11. Among the most important of these studies are Boyer, Paul and Nissenbaum, Stephen, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Demos, Entertaining Satan; Weisman, Richard, Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts (Amherest: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Karlsen, Carol F., The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987)Google Scholar; Godbeer, Richard, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gragg, Larry, The Salem Witch Crisis (New York: Praeger, 1992)Google Scholar. For appraisals of the interpretations of the Salem episode, see Hall, David D., “Witchcraft and the Limits of Interpretation,” New England Quarterly 58 (1985): 253–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosenthal, Bernard, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 32–36, 78–81, 184–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

My criticism of these studies for using explanatory models from the social sciences to explain the Salem episode should not be interpreted as a rejection of the insights that anthropology, sociology, and psychology have to offer to the study of history. Historians have greatly benefited from the use of interpretive models employed in the social sciences, but these methodologies must be supported by the actual evidence and be applicable to the unique historical event under study. Models of interpretation derived from the social sciences are not the only explanatory models available to historians — a political model appears better suited to the Salem episode — and the correlation between any interpretive model and an historical event must be established by empirical investigation, not derived from a priori theory.

Postmodern historical analysis has recently been applied to the Salem episode by Harley, David in “Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession,” American Historical Review 101 (04 1996): 307–30)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Harley affirms the subjective nature of historical reconstruction and disparages attempts by historians to discover what really happened in the past. This does not deter him, however, from presenting his own reconstruction of the past in the belief that it is a faithful account of what really happened. While declaring that “it was the interplay of the explanations [of the Salem crisis] offered at the time that shaped events,” Harley reconstructs the events to fit an interpretive model that clashes with the evidence he presents. He identifies four explanatory narratives (bewitchment, possession, natural disease, and fraud) but examines only two of them (bewitchment and possession). This allows him to effect a radical reduction of complexity and to present the Salem episode in dualistic terms as a struggle between two rival religious cultures — a religious culture of the intellectual elite (“the learned”) supporting possession versus an opposing “popular” or “lay culture” of the masses advocating bewitchment. Recent scholarship has rejected such bipolarity in early New England society between elite and popular belief (Selement, George, Keepers of the Vineyard: The Puritan Ministry and Collective Culture in Colonial New England [Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984]Google Scholar; and Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989]Google Scholar). On Harley's interpretation of the Salem episode, see my letter to the editor and the reply by Harley, in the American Historical Review 101 (10 1996): 1350–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. The theory that the Salem episode resulted from the eating of contaminated rye (ergot) is presented in the following studies: Caporael, Linnda, “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?” Science 192 (04 2, 1976), 21–26CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Matossian, Mary A. K., “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair,” American Scientist 70 (07-08 1982), 355–57Google Scholar, and Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 113–22Google Scholar.

13. Spanos, Nicholas P. and Gottlieb, Jack, “Ergotism and the Salem Village Witch Trials,” Science 194 (12 24 1976), 1390–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Robinson, Enders A., The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692 (New York: Hippocrene, 1991)Google Scholar.

15. Rosenthal, Bernard, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This reflection on Salem's tercentenary of the witch trials of 1692 is much indebted to Rosenthal's excellent study. The vogue of social history has led to a conceptual trend in the study of the Salem episode that favors a complex causal nexus over a distinct sufficient cause to explain what happened. Just about everything that happened prior to the Salem episode in the realms of religion, politics, the economy, public institutions, or the social and psychological environment is seen as contributing its own bit to the events of 1692. Monocausal explanations, invoking one paramount event or condition as the sufficient cause of the witchcraft episode, have been jettisoned as too simple, and a smorgasbord of interpretations, reflecting “a world made up out of multiple and overlapping realms of meaning and behavior,” has been championed (Hall, “Witchcraft,” 281). This approach reflects a failure to distinguish between necessary and sufficient causes for the Salem episode. David D. Hall celebrates “the recent flood of books on witchcraft” for their variety of interpretations. No one interpretation need be endorsed because “this world [of multiple and overlapping realms of meaning and behavior] was rife with contractions. It requires of us, therefore, a tolerance of alternatives, an awareness of our finite understanding, even as it summons us to press against the limits of interpretation” (Hall, “Witchcraft,” 281). As if anticipating being branded a “monocausalist” by American historians, Rosenthal provides many disclaimers of such an approach in his book. He claims his study advocates “a multiplicity of causes” that “resist being subsumed under a single, overall theory” and that “do not lend themselves easily to overarching theories” (7). “Attempts to explain by a single theory what happened in 1692 distort rather than clarify the events of that year” (4). Rosenthal cautions that “no single cause can explain the end of the Salem episode, any more than a single cause can explain the beginning,” even while suggesting that Mary Easty's petition was pivotal to bringing an end to the witch trials (175). He maintains that “there was no grand conspirator behind it all” (192), while claiming that “the context of events did ‘conspire’ to produce a continuous supply of fresh names for the accusers” (192), and that the chief judge of the witchcraft court, Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, “more than anyone else, influenced the judicial course of events” (193). He states that “there can be no single explanation for the Salem witch trials,” while at the same time asserting that “we may reasonably assume that something radically different would have happened had Phips stayed home and the obsessive William Stoughton not been in a position of power. … Failing to acknowledge the almost monomaniacal role of Stoughton, we fail to understand why the court persisted so relentlessly” (195). Rosenthal's disclaimers are issued to satisfy the demands of contemporary American historiography, which has disparaged monocausal interpretations in favor of complex, eclectic explanations of equal merit. As a closet “monocausalist,” Rosenthal carefully couches his argument in the terms of reference and the intellectual assumptions of contemporary historiography on the witch trials, while at the same time pressing his case for a monocausal interpretation. He rejects “elaborate explanations” based on “theories of psychology, biochemistry, and social interaction” in favor of systematic fraud: “at the core of the accusations resided simple fraud” (185). He endorses Thomas Hutchinson's explanation “that the whole was a scene of fraud and imposture” (36). Rosenthal asserts that “no explanation, under scrutiny, has held up as well as that understood by Hutchinson, as well as by a lot of people in 1692” (185). Fraud in the form of judicial malfeasance and the manipulated, coerced, or deceitful testimony of accusers lay at the heart of the Salem episode. Hysteria, according to Rosenthal, inadequately describes “a desperate logic, rational and correct,” that took hold once the judicial proceedings were initiated: “… the safest way out of the web of accusation was through confession, accusation, or claims of affliction. We do not need to look for exotic theories to explain the behavior of the ‘girls of Salem’ once the rules became clear. Thus, a script emerged in which accused, accuser, and the judiciary had a vested interest: The accusers and the judiciary needed the ritual of confession to legitimize their activities, and the confessors needed the continuation of the ritual to avoid the gallows” (50). Rosenthal's explanation of the Salem episode does not conflict with the findings of Boyer and Nissenbaum that social conflicts in Salem Village provided the immediate impetus for the witch trials. These social conflicts, however, could not in themselves have produced the Salem tragedy. This required the administrative machinery of the government and the active involvement of colonial officials. Rosenthal's explanation can accommodate any number of necessary causes for the occurrence of the witch trials — such as social, economic, political, psychological, institutional, and religious conditions — but these necessary causes take a back seat to the sufficient cause: judicial malfeasance. Rosenthal recognizes that individual participants in the Salem episode were influenced by a variety of motivations. The identification of motivational stimuli, however, cannot by itself establish the cause or causes of an event, since motives apply only to individuals, not to groups. Because Rosenthal does not clearly differentiate between causal and motivational factors and does not explicitly draw a distinction between necessary and sufficient causes for the events of 1692, his interpretation is likely to be construed as just one more among many explanations of the Salem episode that may be incorporated into the complex causal nexus that allegedly produced this extraordinary event. Rosenthal's study is already being adapted to fit within the interpretive schema of those who favor an indiscriminate mélange of causes for the events of 1692 by reviewers who hail it as “a welcome addition” to the never-ending reevaluation of the Salem witch trials (Richard Weisman, review of Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, by Rosenthal, Bernard, William and Mary Quarterly 52 [01 1995]: 181–84Google Scholar; and Gragg, Larry, review of Salem Story, American Historical Review 100 [02 1995]: 225–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Rosenthal's fundamental contribution to the study of the Salem episode — bringing a measure of coherence to a dizzying chaos of interpretations by establishing judicial malfeasance as the driving force behind the events of 1692 — is now in danger of being explained away or transformed into one explanatory fragment of a nexus of fragments that must be fitted into an intricate jigsaw puzzle of explanations. The latest study of the Salem episode by Hoffer, Peter Charles, The Devil's Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, confirms that the causal analysis of the Salem episode is dominated by indiscriminate pluralism. Hoffer rejects Rosenthal's thesis in favor of a bewildering array of uncontrollable external forces that fueled “rumor, panic, fearfulness, cultural dysfunction, and official incapacity” and caused the Salem tragedy (Devil's Disciples, 202). He does not determine the relative weight of the causal agents that he presents, and he rejects the idea that his analysis should advance an explicit thesis regarding why the witchcraft episode occurred: “After reading an early version of this book, a good friend asked ‘What is your thesis?’ I could not answer him then and still cannot. I suppose I might argue that the novelties of the story as I have told it are its theses, but that was not what he wanted to know. After much thought, I concluded that some stories do not have theses. They have plot and character, setting and moral. I hope that is enough here” (Devil's Disciples, 266 n. 1).

16. Rosenthal, , Salem Story, 8, 192Google Scholar.

17. Rosenthal, , Salem Story, 6–7Google Scholar.

18. Rosenthal, , Salem Story, 148Google Scholar. Christine Leigh Heyrman credits popular fears over the spread of religious dissent with a major role in fanning witchcraft accusations: “Although sectarian tensions cannot account for all of the prosecutions, they figured in enough cases to indicate that religious differences played a significant role in shaping the witchcraft outbreak, and that the episode constituted in part a counteroffensive against the Quaker heresy under the conditions imposed by the new Massachusetts charter” (Heyrman, , Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690–1759 [New York: W. W. Norton, 1984], 123Google Scholar).

19. The rigorous way in which the judges of the witchcraft court (the Court of Oyer and Terminer) applied the law regarding escheat and forfeiture illustrates an attempt to validate the judicial process, not an attempt to do what was legally right. In a recent study of the forfeitures at Salem, David C. Brown argues, contra Rosenthal, that “the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer conscientiously applied the law and struggled to do what was legally right” (Brown, , “The Forfeitures at Salem, 1692,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 [01 1993]: 85–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Brown arrives at this conclusion due, in part, to his acceptance of Richard Weisman's assessment that it was judicial overzealousness, not judicial malfeasance, that caused the gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the Court of Oyer and Terminer. “The problem posed by the Salem trials,” according to Weisman, “was not that the rules of evidence were treated lightly but rather that they had been taken so seriously. The Court of Oyer and Terminer had organized the most cautiously empirical and systematic investigation into witchcraft ever to occur in New England” (Weisman, , Witchcraft, 179Google Scholar). Brown's conclusion is analogous to the inference that the prosecutors and judges in the McMartin Preschool sex abuse case in Manhattan, California, conscientiously applied the law and struggled to do what was legally right, because they conscientiously participated in the longest (almost seven years) and most expensive ($15 million) trial in the history of the United States which undertook an empirical and systematic investigation of nearly every abomination imaginable (Eberle, Paul and Eberle, Shirley, The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial [Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993]Google Scholar). The actions of the prosecutors and judges in a mass child molestation case in Wenatchee, Washington, are analogous to the Salem episode. On this case, see Claiborne, William, “Child Sex Ring or Witch Hunt: Charges Divide Town,” Washington Post, 11 14, 1995, A1, A13Google Scholar; and “Preacher, Wife Acquitted of Sex Charges: Washington State Couple Had Been Accused of Child Rape, Molestation,” Washington Post, 12 12, 1995, A3Google Scholar; “13-Year-Old Says She Lied in Sex Abuse Trials,” Washington Post, 06 6, 1996, A5Google Scholar; Claiborne, William, “A Child's Recantation: Charges of Witch Hunt Are Rekindled in Washington State Sex Ring Scandal,” Washington Post, 06 14, 1996, A1, A14–A15Google Scholar; and Goldberg, Carey, “Child Sex Case in Northwest Is Facing Renewed Scrutiny,” New York Times, 06 22, 1997, 10Google Scholar. Brown's study of the forfeitures at Salem interprets the events of 1692 as a bipolar conflict “between two legal cultures — English common law and the indigenous laws of Massachusetts that had grown up under the first charter government” (Brown, “Forfeitures,” 86).

20. Program of the “Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial Dedication, Wednesday, August 5, 1992.” The tripartite “fear-superstition-system” explanation of the witchcraft episode was disseminated by the executive director of the Tercentenary Committee, McConchie, Linda C. (“Separating Historic Events from Cultural Celebration: City Comes to Terms with Capitalizing on its Tragic Past,” Salem Evening News, 10 18, 1993, 11)Google Scholar.

21. Final Report, 5–6Google Scholar.

22. Final Report, 9Google Scholar.

23. Final Report, 9Google Scholar.

24. Final Report, 10Google Scholar.

25. Final Report, 12Google Scholar.

26. Final Report, 12Google Scholar.

27. Final Report, 21Google Scholar.

28. Final Report, 15Google Scholar.

29. Program of “Trials of the '90s: Learning from the Past, Building for the Future,” a conference of the Salem Community Alliance, a substance abuse prevention project of the Center for Addictive Behavior, and Salem State College, Division of Graduate and Continuing Education, Saturday, September 19, 1992, Salem State College, Ellison Campus Center, Salem, Massachusetts.

30. Final Report, 6Google Scholar.

31. “Witch Trial Memorial Dedicated,” Salem Evening News, 08 6, 1992, 1Google Scholar.

32. “Winning Memorial Unveiled,” Salem Evening News, 11 15, 1991, 1Google Scholar; “Salem Witch Trials 300th Anniversary: Memorial Will be a Permanent Reminder,” Salem Evening News, 03 27, 1992, 4A–5AGoogle Scholar; and Sherman, Mary, “Giving Symbolic Form to the Crucible: Salem Witch Trials Memorial Competition,” Competitions 2 (Winter 1992): 6–9Google Scholar. For the inscriptions on the memorial, see Appendix 1.

33. Two magistrates in the witch trials are buried in the Charter Street Cemetery: John Hathorne, the great-great-grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bartholomew Gedney. The second wife of Giles Corey, Mary Corey, who died eight years before the Salem witch trials, lies buried here, and the Reverend Nicholas Noyes, minister of Salem at the time of the witch trials, is believed to be buried in the cemetery in an unmarked grave.

34. A statement by the designers, obtained from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 USC 552 (1974), asserts that “the black locust may be the tree from which the ‘witches’ were hung [sic].” Gallows were used for the hangings in Salem, not trees.

35. A more elaborate explanation of the Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial is offered in the Final Report of the 1692–1992 Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee:

The centerpiece of the Tercentenary year was the dedication of the Salem Witch Trials Memorial. Striking in its simplicity, the Memorial is surrounded on three sides by a handcrafted granite dry wall. Inscribed in the stone threshold are the victims' protests of innocence. These protests are interrupted mid-sentence, symbolizing society's indifference to oppression. Six locust tress, the last to flower and the first to shed their leaves, represent the stark injustice of the Trials. At the rear of the Memorial, visitors view the tombstones of the adjacent 17th century [sic] Charter Street Burying Point, a reminder of all who stood in mute witness to the tragedy. Cantilevered stone benches within the Memorial perimeter bear the names and execution dates of each of the twenty victims, creating a quiet, contemplative environment in which to evoke the spirit and strength of those who chose to die rather than compromise their personal truths (17–19).

36. Rosenthal, , Salem Story, 192Google Scholar.

37. Final Report, 8, 17–19Google Scholar.

38. Rosenthal, , Salem Story, 181Google Scholar.

39. “Letters of Governor Phips,” Phips to the Privy Council, 10 12, 1692, in Burr, , Narratives, 196–98Google Scholar; and Boyer, Paul and Nissenbaum, Stephen, eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692, 3 vols. (New York: DaCapo, 1977), 3: 1015–17Google Scholar.

40. Morison, , Intellectual Life, 264Google Scholar.

41. Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 191Google Scholar.

42. Demos, , “Underlying Themes,” 1311Google Scholar.

43. Rosenthal, , Salem Story, 212Google Scholar.

44. Rosenthal, , Salem Story, 212Google Scholar. Misunderstandings of basic features of Puritan society are not uncommon in American historical writing on early New England. David Hackett Fischer, for example, fails to understand the relationship between institutional violence and the maintenance of public order. In his study Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, Fischer incorrectly identifies “public order” as “private order” and “individual order” and finds it paradoxical that “individual order [i.e., public order] coexisted with an institutional savagery that appeared in the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches and the crushing to death with heavy stones of an old man who refused to plead before the court” (Albion's Seed, 189). There is no paradox of public order and institutional violence in Puritan society. Institutional violence was the instrument by which public order was maintained in Puritan New England. Fischer appears to recognize this in his concluding remarks on Massachusetts “order ways” by substituting “collective order” for “private” or “individual order”: “The Puritans added their own special intensity of moral purpose to the general rigor of punishment that existed throughout the Western world in the seventeenth century. The result was a regime that combined collective order and institutional violence in an exceptionally high degree” (Albion's Seed, 195–96).

45. The lynching of blacks in the American South reached a high point in the last two decades of the 19th century. Throughout the early years of this century, violence against blacks was commonplace in the American South. On this violence and its impact on society, see Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E. M., A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynching, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997Google Scholar.

46. Konig, David Thomas, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 171, 176–78Google Scholar; and Sewall, , Diary, 1: 333Google Scholar.

47. The publication ban was issued on October 12, 1692, by Governor Phips just four days after the date of Brattle's letter (Burr, , Narratives, 197Google Scholar).

48. Cotton Mather's official version of the trials was sanctioned by Governor Phips and bore the following inscription on the reverse side of the title page: “Published by the Special Command of his Excellency, the Governor of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in New England” (Burr, , Narratives, 209Google Scholar).

49. [Willard, Samuel], Some Miscellany Observations on Our Present Debates Respecting Witchcrafts, in a Dialogue between S[alem] & B[oston] (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1692)Google Scholar; McCarl, Mary Rhinelander, “Spreading the News of Satan's Malignity in Salem: Benjamin Harris, Printer and Publisher of the Witchcraft Narratives,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 129 (01 1993): 56–58Google Scholar; and Peterson, Mark A., “‘Ordinary’ Preaching and the Interpretation of the Salem Witchcraft Crisis by the Boston Clergy,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 129 (01 1993): 89–90Google Scholar.

50. Maule, Thomas, Truth Held Forth and Maintained According to the Testimony of the Holy Prophets Christ and His Apostles Recorded in the Holy Scriptures (n.p. [New York: Wm. Bradford], 1695)Google Scholar; Philathes, Tho. [Maule, Thomas], New England Pesecutors [sic] Mauled with their own Weapons (n.p. [New York: Wm. Bradford], 1697)Google Scholar; and Konig, , Law and Society, 189–90Google Scholar. Konig considers Maule's case to be important. According to him, it marked the general acceptance of law in Essex society. This case, however, appears to be an isolated example of a jury that was able to express its scorn for the presiding judges by voting for acquittal on the basis of a narrow interpretation of the truth. The influence that Konig claims for this case is doubtful, since runaway juries never became the norm in Essex county. For a full discussion of the Maule case, see Maule, James E., Better That 100 Witches Should Live: The 1696 Acquittal of Thomas Maule of Salem, Massachusetts, on Charges of Seditious Libel and Its Impact on the Development of First Amendment Freedoms (Villanova, Pa.: Jembook, 1995)Google Scholar.

51. Calef, Robert, “More Wonders,” in Burr, , Narratives, 293Google Scholar.

52. Upham, , Salem Witchcraft, 2: 462–64Google Scholar.

53. On the virtual absence of public documentation on the trials between the years 1692 and 1696, see Weisman, , Witchcraft, 171Google Scholar.

54. Beatty, Jack, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874–1958 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992)Google Scholar; Martin, Ralph G., Seeds of Destruction: Joe Kennedy and His Sons (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995)Google Scholar; and Kessler, Ronald, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded (New York: Warner, 1996)Google Scholar.

55. Upon the announcement of the 1994 Honor Award of the American Institute of Architects, the profession's highest recognition of design excellence for individual buildings, Neil J. Harrington, major of Salem, said that he and city officials were “thrilled that the Witch Trials memorial has won numerous awards, including this one,” and predicted that it would help efforts to market the city as a tourist site. Harrington remarked that the award would “undoubtedly” help promote tourism in the Witch City (“Witch Memorial Honored: Architects praise Salem Monument,” Salem Evening News, 02 2, 1994, 1Google Scholar).

56. Jurors' comments from the 1993 Art and Architecture Collaborations Awards Program of the Boston Society of Architects. The jury was composed of Elizabeth Padjen, FAIA, Jury Chairman, President, the Boston Society of Architects; Lelia Amalfitano, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Marty Carlock, freelance writer on art and architecture; Margaret Hickey, Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston; Alexander Howe, AIA, Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, Inc., Boston; Mary Shannon, Office of Cultural Affairs, Boston City Hall; and Peter Vanderwarker, architectural photographer, Newton, Massachusetts.

57. Jurors' comments from the 1994 Honor Awards of the American Institute of Architects. The jury was composed of Donlyn Lyndon, FAIA, Jury Chairman, Lyndon/Buchanan Associates, Berkeley; Ted Flato, AIA, Lake Flato Architects Inc., San Antonio; Raymond Gindroz, AIA, UDA Architects PC, Pittsburgh; Jan Abell, AIA, Jan Abell Kenneth Garcia Partners, Tampa; Peter van Dijk, FAIA, van Dilk Pace Westlake and Partners, Cleveland; Betsy West, Assoc. AIA, the Freelon Group, Research Triangle Park, N.C.; Adele Chatfield-Taylor, American Academy in Rome, New York City; Robert A. Barthelman, architecture student, Kent State University; and Magali Sarfatti Larson, Ph.D., professor of sociology, Temple University, Philadelphia.

58. Invitation to the presentation of the 1994 Salem Award.

59. “Witch Trials Tercentennial Committee files Final Report,” Salem Evening News, 06 24, 1993, 11Google Scholar.