Tag: Salem

January 25, 2025

A History of Spiritualism and the Occult in Salem The Rise of Witch City

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Free Download Maggi Smith-Dalton, "A History of Spiritualism and the Occult in Salem: The Rise of Witch City"
English | ISBN: 1609495519 | 2012 | 160 pages | EPUB | 7 MB
Salem, Massachusetts, is the quintessential New England town, with its cobbled streets and strong ties to the sea. With the notoriety of the Salem witch trials, the city’s reputation has been irrevocably linked to the occult. However, few know the history behind the religion of Spiritualism and the social movement that took root in this romanticized land. At the turn of the century, seers, mediums and magnetic healers all hoped to connect to the spiritual world. The popularity of Spiritualism and renewed interest in the occult blossomed out of an attempt to find an intellectual and emotional balance between science and religion. Learn of early converts, the role of the venerable Essex Institute and the psychic legacy of "Moll" Pitcher. Historian Maggi Smith-Dalton delves into Salem’s exotic history, unraveling the beginnings of Spiritualism and the rise of the Witch City.

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January 14, 2025

Stories & Shadows from Salem’s Past Naumkeag Notations

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Free Download Maggi Smith-Dalton, "Stories & Shadows from Salem’s Past: Naumkeag Notations"
English | ISBN: 1540224880 | 2010 | 146 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
An influential maritime port during the colonial and federal periods and the long-ago home of noted author Nathaniel Hawthorne, this quaint New England city is widely popular today for its unique contribution to witch history and culture. Salem has many stories-famous architect Samuel McIntire’s reshaping of the city, T.S. Eliot’s deep roots in the community and, of course, seances and mystic healers from the psychic past. In this collection of intriguing tales based on her column, Naumkeag Notations," featured in the Salem Gazette, historian Maggi Smith-Dalton offers a melodic journey through the many cobbled avenues of Salem’s history."

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September 16, 2024

The Salem Witch Trials Reader

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Free Download Frances Hill, "The Salem Witch Trials Reader"
English | 2000 | pages: 440 | ISBN: 030680946X | EPUB | 5,2 mb
Against the backdrop of a Puritan theocracy threatened by change, in a population terrified not only of eternal damnation but of the earthly dangers of Indian massacres and recurrent smallpox epidemics, a small group of girls denounces a black slave and others as worshipers of Satan. Within two years, twenty men and women are hanged or pressed to death and over a hundred others imprisoned and impoverished. In The Salem Witch Trials Reader, Frances Hill provides and astutely comments upon the actual documents from the trial-examinations of suspected witches, eyewitness accounts of "Satanic influence," as well as the testimony of those who retained their reason and defied the madness. Always drawing on firsthand documents, she illustrates the historical background to the witchhunt and shows how the trials have been represented, and sometimes distorted, by historians-and how they have fired the imaginations of poets, playwrights, and novelists. For those fascinated by the Salem witch trials, this is compelling reading and the sourcebook.

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September 13, 2024

The Witches Salem, 1692

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Free Download Stacy Schiff, "The Witches: Salem, 1692"
English | 2015 | pages: 512 | ISBN: 0316200603, 031620059X | EPUB | 9,5 mb
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.

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April 26, 2024

Witch Hunts From Salem to Guantanamo Bay

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Free Download Robert Rapley, "Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay"
English | 2007 | ISBN: 0773531866 | EPUB | pages: 326 | 2.0 mb
Witch hunts are the products of intense fear and paranoia and the results are often terrible. The accused in three famous witchcraft cases – in Bamberg and Wurzburg, Germany, in Loudun, France, and in Salem, Massachusetts – were assumed to be guilty without proof. Secret accusations were accepted, evidence was falsified, and extreme pressures, including torture, were used. Arguing that fear was, and still is, a prerequisite to any witch hunt, Robert Rapley shows that the current hunt for terrorists mirrors the witch crazes of the past. Rapley analyses witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and finds many of the same elements repeated in more recent miscarriages of justice – from the Dreyfus case for treason in late nineteenth-century France, to the persecution of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama for the gang rape of two white girls in the 1930s, to the Guildford and Maguire terrorist prosecutions in Britain in the 1970s. All three cases took place during times of extreme fear and paranoia and in all cases the accused were innocent.Today, argues Rapley, the "witch" lives on in the "terrorist." He cites as evidence Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the first prisons created for "witches" since Salem. In Witch Hunts he makes a compelling case that, in the wake of 9/11, witch hunts threaten today’s America.

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