Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [0]
American Controversies Series
Series Editor: Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College
Students love debate. They love contention, which they see all about them in modern society. Yet too many monographs or biographies erase the controversies that existed in earlier decades. Slavery and institutionalized sexism, for example, strike modern readers as being so clearly wrong that they cannot understand why rational Americans endorsed slavery or thought it foolish to enfranchise women. How could a politician as brilliant as Thomas Jefferson believe that forced assimilation was the best policy for Native Americans? Why did Americans allow Hitler to become so powerful before confronting him? Why were many of the so-called Greatest Generation indifferent to social justice at home? How did the Vietnam War become such a political and cultural powder keg? Hindsight is often the enemy of understanding, and what strikes us as obvious was often anything but simple to earlier generations.
This series deals with major controversies in American history. The events depicted in this series were either controversial at the time (such as militant abolitionism) or have sparked modern historiographical controversies. (Did slave conspiracies actually exist, for example? Why did witch trials in Salem spiral out of control in 1692?) Each volume in the series begins with an extensive essay that explains the topic, discusses the relevant historiography, and summarizes the various points of view (contemporaneous as well as modern). The second half of the volume is devoted to documents, but each is annotated and preceded by a brief introduction. By contextualizing each document, this series pulls back the curtain, so to speak, on the process of writing history, even as the essays, letters, laws, and newspaper accounts that follow allow important American actors to speak in their own voices. Most of all, by examining both sides in these debates, and by providing documents that see each issue from different angles, the American Controversies Series will bring history alive—and enliven history classrooms.
Volumes Published
Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776–1821
Gary J. Kornblith
Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan
Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson
Witchcraft in Early North America
Alison Games
Witchcraft in Early North America
Alison Games
Cover illustrations: Witch riding the Devil, from Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster (London, 1684); English witch, from The Wonderful discoverie of the witchcraft of Margaret and Phillip Flower, daughters of Joan Flower neere Bever Castle: executed at Lincolne, March 11, 1618 (London, 1619), both items reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; The Conjurer, from Thomas Hariot, A Brief and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfort-
am-Main, 1590), plate XI, reproduced by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library; Isaac Jogues, from François Ducreux, Historiae Canadensis (Paris, 1664), The Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-49877.
Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Games, Alison, 1963-
Witchcraft in Early North America / Alison Games.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-0357-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0359-4