Rating: 
Summary: boring
Review: this book is the most boring book i have ever read
Rating: 
Summary: More Fine Points on the Salem Witch Craft Hysteria
Review: This has been a very popular book with many Salem Witch Trials researchers. This particular book focuses on the competition and jelousy over land in Salem Village. Some very excellent chats also depict the "Anti Parris" people of the time and how they were connected to those accused. Interesting points are also made in regards to taxation.A definite book to check out if you are interested in all aspects and theories of this truly sad time.
Rating:
Summary: a complete picture of a time and place
Review: This is a wonderful book. Boyer and Neissenbaum take you to society and the time right before the witch trials took place. They give you all the information you need to feel what life was like there and to understand the underlying tensions and disputes, jealousies and arrogance. Things were changing. Some people wanted --and benefited from the changes-- others didn't want, and were antagonistic to, the changes. The ideal of the community was being tested by economic opportunity, which was fostering economic greed. An increasing stratified society was coming into being. Meanwhile, there was no mechanism available for petty disputes to be resolved via the courts or other public venues -- this is just a short list of the variety of problems that sat unresolved and which eventually broke loose in the hysteria of a witch hunting. This is an amazingly complex and fascinating story--the research and scholarship here is extraordinary. If you want to know what lead up to the witch trials this is the book you want to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Important but flawed
Review: When I was a history grad student in the mid-1980s, Salem Possessed was widely viewed as a masterpiece of the "new" social history, i.e., the history of the lives of everyday people, as opposed to major political events and cultural high points. In it, scholars Boyer and Nissenbaum take the then-standard Salem witchcraft narrative and subject it to reinterpretation on the basis of patterns and trends they see in the social history of Salem and Salem Village (now Danvers). Essentially, they argue that the witchcraft accusations and prosecutions were an unconscious (or perhaps conscious) means by which the poorer and more agrarian segment of the Salem Village population got back at the wealthier and more worldly types. As social history of Salem and Danvers in the 17th century, much of the book is fascinating and insightful. However, as an explanation of the witchcraft crisis, the book is, in my opinion, implausible. Too often, the authors seem to be reading into the data, finding evidence of discord where little or none exists. As one example, they interpret the bare negotiating positions of Salem Village and Samuel Parris regarding the hiring of Parris as minister to evidence aggressive overreaching on Parris's part, without any comparison to the agreements typically reached by other towns and ministers. More importantly, it's simply very hard to believe that, based on the types of disagreements the authors claim to have existed, people would hate their neighbors enough to throw about accusations of capital crimes on a vast scale. Salem Possessed stands today as another in a long line of unsatisfying attempts to make sense of the witchcraft crisis. Until the publication in 2002 of Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare (a work I found much more persuasive), Salem Possessed was perhaps the most influential scholarly interpretation of those events. (For example, its theories formed the basis of the PBS series Three Sovereigns for Sarah.) In my opinion, Salem Possessed has since been shown to be a wild goose chase.
Rating:
Summary: Important but flawed
Review: When I was a history grad student in the mid-1980s, Salem Possessed was widely viewed as a masterpiece of the "new" social history, i.e., the history of the lives of everyday people, as opposed to major political events and cultural high points. In it, scholars Boyer and Nissenbaum take the then-standard Salem witchcraft narrative and subject it to reinterpretation on the basis of patterns and trends they see in the social history of Salem and Salem Village (now Danvers). Essentially, they argue that the witchcraft accusations and prosecutions were an unconscious (or perhaps conscious) means by which the poorer and more agrarian segment of the Salem Village population got back at the wealthier and more worldly types. As social history of Salem and Danvers in the 17th century, much of the book is fascinating and insightful. However, as an explanation of the witchcraft crisis, the book is, in my opinion, implausible. Too often, the authors seem to be reading into the data, finding evidence of discord where little or none exists. As one example, they interpret the bare negotiating positions of Salem Village and Samuel Parris regarding the hiring of Parris as minister to evidence aggressive overreaching on Parris's part, without any comparison to the agreements typically reached by other towns and ministers. More importantly, it's simply very hard to believe that, based on the types of disagreements the authors claim to have existed, people would hate their neighbors enough to throw about accusations of capital crimes on a vast scale. Salem Possessed stands today as another in a long line of unsatisfying attempts to make sense of the witchcraft crisis. Until the publication in 2002 of Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare (a work I found much more persuasive), Salem Possessed was perhaps the most influential scholarly interpretation of those events. (For example, its theories formed the basis of the PBS series Three Sovereigns for Sarah.) In my opinion, Salem Possessed has since been shown to be a wild goose chase.
Rating: 
Summary: New Historical look at the Salem witch trials
Review: When we think of the Salem with trials the first thing we we would think of are witches in the European style, flying on brooms, speaking in tongues etcetera. This because they were taken by the devil. To get rid of the witches and therefore the devil they had to be tried and afterwards liquidated. The most famous case was of course in Salem, MA 1692. Arthur Miller wrote the play `The Crucible' as a parable of McCarthy Era America and the movie does the same thing. For a long time the events in Salem were soon as a strange case in history, Boyer and Nissenbaum decided to look at the records and writings of that era again and came up with a fascinating new history of the Salem witchtrials.
The looked at the lives of the people in Salem from the beggar to the minister and also at three of the leading families in Salem. The minister Parrish plays the most important role in their story because they devide the town up into two camps; the pro and contra Parrish people. They find out that mixed in this is also the strife within one family with ties to another important Salem factory. For B&N the witchtrials are more a battleground of different social groups than the fight against the devil.
They unfortunately did not entirely look at the more psychological reasons for the events. Salem was not alone in it's social build and therefore something like this should have happened in more places, but it didn't.
This book has often been heralded as an important book in the post-modern historical society for looking at more things and the people too, except the rulers. It also shows how easy it is to debunk myths if you just look at the sources.
If yore are interested in the witch trials this book will certainly be liked.
| 
