HIST 6030 - Witchcraft in Colonial America - McNabb

Critical Article Review - Selections

Each of the journal articles below can be accessed through JSTOR via the Rod Library Database link. In preparation for Week 8 of class, which involves the preparation of a critical review and preparation for a class presentation, you will select two of the articles below related to your own area of research interest (you can stay within individual categories or move between them). You will then identify through your own research, using search engines or databases and/or drawing on the bibliographies of the assigned texts, one additional scholarly article. Your critical review, due March 4, will focus on the three articles you select.    

Note: in order to get acquaint with recent scholarship, the article you identify and select must be published after 1995, and you should aim for something published in 2000 or later.   

Magic and the Supernatural

Butler, Jon. “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760.” The American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (1979): 317-46.

Harley, David. “Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession.” The American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996), 307-30.

Kibbey, Ann. “Mutations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Remarkable Providences, and the Power of Puritan Men," American Quarterly, 34 (1982): 125-48.

Race and Ethnicity

Breslaw, Elaine “Tituba's Confession: The Multicultural Dimensions of the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt.” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (1997): 535-56.

Lovejoy, David. “Satanizing the American Indian.” New England Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1994): 603-21.

McMillan, Timothy. "Black Magic: Witchcraft, Race, and Resistance in Colonial New England." Journal of Black Studies 25 (1994): 99-117.

McWilliams, John. "Indian John and the Northern Tawnies." New England Quarterly 69 (1996): 580-604.

Tucker, Veta Smith. “Purloined Identity: The Racial Metamorphosis of Tituba of Salem Village.” Journal of Black Studies 30, No. 4 (2000): 624-34.

Symptoms, Law, and Evidence

Brown, David C. "The Forfeitures at Salem, 1692," William and Mary Quarterly 59 (1993): 85-111.

Craker, Wendel D. "Spectral Evidence, Non-Spectral Acts of Witchcraft and Confession at Salem in 1692." Historical Journal 40 (1997), 331-58.

Davies, Owen. “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations,” Folklore 114 (2003): 181-203. 

Zeller, Anne C. "Arctic Hysteria in Salem?" Anthropologica 32 (1990): 239-64.

Religion and Reason

Gould, Philip. “New England Witch-Hunting and the Politics of Reason in the Early Republic.” New England Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1995): 58-82.

Latner, Richard. "‘Here Are No Newters’: Witchcraft and Religious Discord in Salem Village and Andover.” New England Quarterly 79 (2006): 92-122.

Ray, Benjamin. “Satan’s War Against the Covenant in Salem Village.” New England Quarterly 80 (2007): 69-95.

Reis, Elizabeth. “The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England.” Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (1995): 15-36.

The following are the substantive articles in a special installment of the William and Mary Quarterly [volume 65, no. 3 (2008)], published as a retrospective of Boyer and Nissenbaum’s landmark text.

Burns, Margo, and Bernard Rosenthal. “Examination of the Records of the Salem Witch Trials.” 401-22.

Latner, Richard. “Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem’s Witch-Hunters Modernization’s Failures?” 423-448.

Ray, Benjamin C. “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village.” 449-78.

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum, “‘Salem Possessed’ in Retrospect.” 503-34.