Ann Putnam Quotes

Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone, has spent years studying the effects of ethnic diversity on a community’s well-being. It turns out diversity is a train wreck. Contrary to his expectation—and desire!—Putnam’s study showed that the greater the ethnic diversity, the less people trusted their neighbors, their local leaders, and even the news. People in diverse communities gave less to charity, voted less, had fewer friends, were more unhappy, and were more likely to describe television as “my most important form of entertainment.” It was not, Putnam said, that people in diverse communities trusted people of their own ethnicity more, and other races less. They didn’t trust anyone.28 The difference in neighborliness between an ethnically homogeneous town, such as Bismarck, North Dakota, and a diverse one, such as Los Angeles, Putnam says, is “roughly the same as” the difference in a town with a 7 percent poverty rate compared with a 23 percent poverty rate.29

It all makes you wonder what you would've done had you been kicking around back then. If a teen girl, would you have followed the herd? If the mother of eight dead babies like Ann Putnam Sr., would you have given yourself a few hard bruises and then gleefully joined in the accusing because what else could explain your misfortunes? If you were a judge and "It" Puritan Cotton Mather, would you have ridden all the way out from Cambridge to see for yourself just what in the heck was going on in Salem Village? Would you have allowed into evidence proof from both this world and the invisible one into which only the purest heart can see?

DID ANN PUTNAM SR. name Rebecca Nurse because of the border dispute, because her husband opposed Parris and had opposed James Bayley, because—although relative latecomers—the Nurses had managed to secure a large tract of village land, because Rebecca hailed from an intolerably harmonious family, or because she took the sacrament in Salem town, occupying a former Putnam pew in the village when she did not? Would she have been named had she visited the parsonage girls, which she did not do from fear of contagion?

One bit of reckoning remained. On August 25, 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. stood amid the Salem village congregation to be admitted as a full church member. She was twenty-seven. Both her parents had died, leaving nine siblings in her care. Ann had not married. In more prosperous times, she had been afflicted by at least sixty-two people, among them her former minister, now dead; a neighbor, now dead; and teenage Dorothy Good, now insane. Of the nineteen who had been hanged, she had testified under oath against all but two. For over eight months whole communities had hung on her every syllable. She now stood silently as, from the same pulpit on which she had wildly pointed to a yellow bird during Lawson’s sermon, Salem’s new minister read aloud her confession. The onetime prophet

A great number of Americans have made the same startling discovery that Francis Dane did: They are related to witches. American presidents descend from George Jacobs, Susannah Martin, and John Procter. Nathan Hale was John Hale’s grandson. Israel “Don’t Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes” Putnam was the cousin of Ann Putnam. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louisa May Alcott descended from Samuel Sewall; Clara Barton from the Townes; Walt Disney from Burroughs. (In a nice twist, the colonial printer who founded the American Antiquarian Society, where Cotton Mather’s papers reside today, was also a Burroughs descendant.) The Nurse family includes Lucille Ball, who testified before an investigator from the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Yes, she had registered with the Communist Party. No, she was not a Communist. In 1953, a husband leaped to a wife’s defense: “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair,” Desi Arnaz explained,

Might Ann Putnam Sr. have named Rebecca Nurse simply because the Nurses prospered where the Putnams did not? It is because Miss Gulch owns half the property in town that Auntie Em cannot say what she thinks of her to her face; witchcraft permitted a good Christian woman to speak her mind.

along your arms may grow just a little more intense, as the scalp tingles at the mention of lice. Already at the center of the community, Betty and Abigail claimed its rapt attention, something others obviously craved. Mary Rowlandson was candid on that subject. “Before I knew what affliction meant,” she admitted in her captivity narrative, “I was ready sometimes to wish for it.” She could not have been the only New England woman who longed for a test by which to prove her holiness. Elizabeth Knapp sobbed not only that she led a spiritually unprofitable life, but that her “labor was burdensome to her.” No one chastened an afflicted girl or sent her to gather firewood. Elizabeth Hubbard set off on no further terrifying errands, wolves nipping at her heels; any number of Cinderellas were relieved of their chores. (Ann Putnam Sr.—the first adult woman to be afflicted—wore herself out precisely because the girls on whose labor she relied contorted. She had cause for grief, for which there was little place in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.

noticed. That’s when you use your power. Sometimes you got to act like you are nothing—so long as you remember that it’s a lie. So long as you remember you’re as strong as you believe you are.” Salem, 1693 Tituba, little Dorcas Good, Sarah Carrier, and ninety-three other falsely accused women, men, and children stumble out of Salem and Boston jails when the court of Oyer and Terminer is suspended by the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Judge Hathorne watches them limp back into Salem—the orphaned children, the widows, the daughter who testified against her mother. He rages at the magistrates who recant their verdicts and at the accusers—Betty Parris and Ann Putnam first among them—who apologize for the terror they wrought. “The victims believed Satan was here and I still believe it,” Hathorne tells his wife. “You