Salem Massachusetts Quotes

IN 1692 THE Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft.

It was a strange experience to be looking out the window of an eighteenth-century Chinese house at a seventeenth-century colonial graveyard full of people in twenty-first-century Halloween costumes. Salem, guys.

As all this suggests our relationship with evidence is seldom purely a cognitive one. Vilifying menstruating women bolstering anti-Muslim stereotypes murdering innocent citizens of Salem plainly evidence is almost always invariably a political social and moral issue as well. To take a particularly stark example consider the case of Albert Speer minister of armaments and war production during the Third Reich close friend to Adolf Hitler and highest-ranking Nazi official to ever express remorse for his actions. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich Speer candidly addressed his failure to look for evidence of what was happening around him. "I did not query a friend who told him not to visit Auschwitz I did not query Himmler I did not query Hitler " he wrote. "I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate for I did not want to know what was happening there... for fear of discovering something which might have made me turn away from my course. I had closed my eyes." Judge William Stoughton of Salem Massachusetts became complicit in injustice and murder by accepting evidence that he should have ignored. Albert Speer became complicit by ignoring evidence he should have accepted. Together they show us some of the gravest possible consequences of mismanaging the data around us and the vital importance of learning to manage it better. It is possible to do this: like in the U.S. legal system we as individuals can develop a fairer and more consistent relationship to evidence over time. By indirection Speer himself shows us how to begin. I did not query he wrote. I did not speak. I did not investigate. I closed my eyes. This are sins of omission sins of passivity and they suggest correctly that if we want to improve our relationship with evidence we must take a more active role in how we think must in a sense take the reins of our own minds. To do this we must query and speak and investigate and open our eyes. Specifically and crucially we must learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it.

The Massachusetts elite had read everything in sight, some of it too closely. As would be said of logic-loving Ipswich minister John Wise, those men were not so much the masters as the victims of learning. They had read and reread bushels of witchcraft texts. They parsed legal code. They knew their history. They worked in the sterling name of reason.

place in Massachusetts from the Salem witch trials onward. Secondly, humans die, and their brains

It was like being a fly on the wall at a meeting. JACK WELCH ON HIS JOB AT AGE TWELVE AS A CADDY FOR LOCAL BUSINESSMEN AT A SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, COUNTRY CLUB

The one professional school, Harvard, had been founded to provide training for one profession only, the ministry; recently

If you start having a society where people are policing their own thoughts, now we’re back in Salem, Massachusetts, where literally, they didn’t do anything for fun, and then that pressure built up and they all went nuts.

With less exactitude but much relish, Puritan enemies marveled at the Massachusetts frenzy. They were eagerly “hanging one another” for precisely the crime, noted two Quaker merchants who visited Salem that fall, of which they liked to accuse their supposedly devil-worshipping sect. Indeed they were “hotly and madly, mauling one another in the dark,” as Cotton Mather wailed. Witch-hunting seemed to encourage you to act like the very creatures—Catholics, Frenchmen, wizards—you abhorred.

The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding...Witches in the abstract were not hanged in Salem; but one by one were brought to the gallows...After you have studied their lives faithfully, a remarkable thing happens; you discover that if you really know the few, you are on your way to understanding the millions. By grasping the local, the parochial even, it is possible to make a beginning at understanding the universal.

But Mather's smile faded as he thought of what other provisions the charter contained. What would the godly say when they learned that the electorate was no longer to be limited to members of the Covenant but broadened to include propertied members of every Christian sect this side of papistry? This was a revolutionary innovation, whose consequences would be incalculable. Hitherto the limitation of the privilege of voting to the elect had been the very corner-stone of theocracy. It had been a wise and human provision designed to keep the faithful in control even when, as had long ago become the case, they were heavily outnumbered by lesser men without the Covenant. God who had not designated the majority of men to salvation surely never intended for the damned to rule. Yet now, under the new charter, it very much looked as if they might.

The history of New England, and especially of Massachusetts, is full of the horrors that have turned life into gloom, joy into despair, naturalness into disease, honesty and truth into hideous lies and hypocrisies. The ducking-stool and whipping post, as well as numerous other devices of torture, were the favorite English methods for American purification. Boston, the city of culture, has gone down in the annals of Puritanism as the “Bloody Town.” It rivaled Salem, even, in her cruel persecution of unauthorized religious opinions. On the now famous Common a half-naked woman, with a baby in her arms, was publicly whipped for the crime of free speech; and on the same spot Mary Dyer, another Quaker woman, was hanged in 1659. In fact, Boston has been the scene of more than one wanton crime committed by Puritanism. Salem, in the summer of 1692, killed eighteen people for witchcraft. Nor was Massachusetts alone in driving out the devil by fire and brimstone. As Canning justly said: “The Pilgrim fathers infested the New World to redress the balance of the Old.” The horrors of that period have found their most supreme expression in the American classic, THE SCARLET LETTER.

The irresistible locked room mystery of the matter is what keeps us coming back to it. In 300 years, we have not adequately penetrated 9 months of Massachusetts history. If we knew more about Salem, we might attend to it less, a conundrum that touches on something of what propelled the witch panic in the first place. Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another. Often what pinches and pricks, Nas, claws, stabs, and suffocates, like a 17th century which, is the irritatingly unsolved puzzle in the next room.

The autumn hit-and-run raids and the colonists’ attempts to retaliate ended with the early onset of especially heavy snowfalls that year. Over the next few months, the Massachusetts government dispatched to Maine companies of “country soldiers” to augment the inadequate regional militia forces. The troops, however, proved a mixed blessing to local residents and stimulated great controversy, especially in Black Point. There taxpayers later complained bitterly that they had not asked for the soldiers and had derived little benefit from their presence, yet they had nevertheless been required to pay the soldiers’ expenses. Even more galling, they explained, was the fact that the local commander, Joshua Scottow, who had moved to Maine from Boston a few years earlier, had used the men for his own personal gain, employing them to pave his yard, move his barn, and build a palisade for his property.

Ah, New England. An amalgam of picket fences and crumbling bricks; Ivy League schools and dropped Rs; social tolerance and the Salem witch trials, Henry David Thoreau and Stephen King, P-town rainbows and mill-town rust; Norman Rockwell and Aerosmith; lobster and Moxie; plus the simmering aromas of a million melting pot cuisines originally brought here by immigrants from everywhere else searching for new ways to live. It’s a place where rapidly-growing progressive cities full of the ‘wicked smaaht’ coexist alongside blight-inflicted Industrial Revolution landscapes full of the ‘wicked poor’. A place of forested mountains, roaring rivers, crystalline lakes, urban sprawl, and a trillion dollar stores. A place of seasonal tourism beach towns where the wild, rank scent of squishy seaweed casts its cryptic spell along the vast and spindrift-misted seacoast, while the polished yachts of the elite glisten like rare jewels on the horizon, just out of reach. Where there are fiery autumn hues and leaves that need raking. Powder snow ski slopes and icy windshields that need scraping. Crisp daffodil mornings and mud season. Beach cottage bliss and endless miles of soul-sucking summer traffic . Perceived together, the dissonant nuances of New England stir the imagination in compelling and chromatic whorls.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

Her clever, hypothetical riposte was “But put the case, sir, that I do fear the Lord and my parents; may not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me leave?” That is, should human authority take precedence over the divine? This was a reasonable question in a time and place with little separation of church and state. The very concept of such a separation would not be introduced in Massachusetts society until more than a half century later, following the debacle of the witch trials in Salem Village.

The segregation of the girls would have served to localize the psychic infection, and the girls themselves, exposed to the wayward streak of poetry in Mather's composition, would almost certainly have found their fantasies deflected to the more normal preoccupations of adolescence. They would, in short, like a large proportion of the female members of his congregation at at given time, have fallen in love with him. Infatuation is not any guarantee against hysteria; quite the contrary. But in this case such a development might have diverted the antics of the girls to less malignant forms.

Something about them does not make you feel at ease. In Salem, Massachusetts,

Most would find it surprising to learn that America was consciously, intentionally, and specifically founded and formed after the pattern of ancient Israel. Its founders saw it as a new Israel, the Israel of the New World. It was their exodus from Europe like the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. The New World was their new promised land, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was their New Jerusalem. As for the legal system of the new American commonwealth, the Puritans sought to incorporate the Law of Moses. They instituted a day of rest after the pattern of the Hebrew Sabbath. And the American holiday, Thanksgiving, was formed after the pattern of the Hebrew Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. They named the mountains of America after the mountains of Israel: Mount Gilead, Mount Hermon, Mount Ephraim, Mount Moriah, Mount Carmel, and Mount Zion. They called their towns and cities, Jericho, Jordan, Salem, Canaan, Goshen, Hebron, and Beersheba. They named their children Joshua, Rachel, Ezra, Zechariah, Esther, Jeremiah, and a host of other names derived from the people of ancient Israel.

In 2016. We have robots on Mars and supercomputers in our pockets, and people are still afraid of the hoodoo. Yet

The ingredient list for a spell is much less interesting than the effects of the spell itself.

Nathaniel Bowditch… the father of American Navigation was born on March 26, 1773, in Salem, Massachusetts. At the age of ten; he left school to work in his father's cooperage, before becoming a bookkeeping apprentice, to a ship chandler. At fourteen years of age he taught himself Algebra and later Calculus. He poured over books critical to the development of Astronomy, such as those written by Sir Isaac Newton. He also corrected thousands of calculation errors in John Hamilton Moore’s book “The New Practical Navigator.” As a young man he learned Latin and French allowing him to read foreign technical books and translated Pierre Simon de Laplace’s book on mathematics and theoretical astronomy. In 1795, Bowditch went to sea on his first voyage as a ship's clerk and yeoman. By his fifth voyage at sea he was promoted to Captain and was a part owner of the vessel. Following this voyage, he returned to Salem in 1803, resuming his studies. In 1802, his book The American Practical Navigator was first published. That same year, Harvard University awarded Bowditch an honorary Master of Arts degree. His tireless academic work earned him a significant standing, including acceptance to the “American Academy of Arts and Sciences.” In 1806, Bowditch was offered the “Chair of Mathematics and Physics at Harvard” as well as at the “United States Military Academy and the University of Virginia.” His encyclopedia of navigation “The American Practical Navigator,” usually just referred to by his name “Bowditch,” still serves as a valuable handbook on oceanography and meteorology, and contains useful tables and a maritime glossary. Without a doubt it is the finest book on Navagation ever written.

The Specter of Salem reveals how the cultural memory of an event, like the episode of witch-hunting in 1692 Massachusetts, often has a longer-lasting effect than the event itself.

The Puritans are conventionally considered more "moderate" than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans were no less mad... They forbade Church of England clergy from setting foot in their new American theocracy in Boston and Salem, hung Quakers, and passed a law to hang any Catholic priests who might dare show up.

First, some clarification of misunderstood aspects of the ‘Salem witchcraft.’ Salem was the seat of Essex County, and thus, the location of the jail and courthouse. The first ‘witchcraft’ incidents appear to have taken place in Salem Village, which was the original name of what is today, Danvers, Massachusetts. Charges quickly were made in other Essex County towns, including Salem Town. The largest number of charges were made in Andover – more than fifty.

Samuel Willard’s account of her afflictions, widely available in published form after 1684 in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences, almost certainly influenced the statements offered eight years later during the witchcraft outbreak. The historian Jane Kamensky has cogently argued that the obsession with books (especially small, easily concealed ones) evident in the Salem records resulted from an explosion in the availability of such volumes after the mid-1680s. After decades in which the sole Bay Colony press published nothing but sermons and official documents, not only were several printers in Massachusetts and the middle colonies now producing almanacs and primers, but increasing numbers of booksellers were also importing books on such topics as astrology and fortune-telling. Because all sorts of occult practices were linked to the devil, clergymen and magistrates could readily envision the dangers potentially lurking in the pages of those volumes. Such concerns induced them to ask the leading questions of many confessors that elicited concurring responses, although Ann Sr.’s vision of the “little Red book” appears to have been her own.

Captain Preston loathes the colonists. In his own words, he says these “malcontents” are “using every method to fish out evidence to prove [the shooting] was a concerted scheme to murder the inhabitants.” John Adams does not believe that. He sees a spontaneous demonstration that got out of control.

There was no need to look any farther for a culprit. Their constant and implacable companion, so much in the air they breathed, an occupant of every Massachusetts town, had made them do it. In Salem village as elsewhere he crept back into the discourse. In a particularly ebullient 1693 address, Mather had

Yet although this particular delusion, at least in the form of a large-scale public enterprise, has vanished from the western world, the urge to hunt 'witches' has done nothing of the kind. It has been revived on a colossal scale by replacing the medieval idea of malefic witchcraft by pseudo-scientific concepts like 'race' and 'nationality,' and by substituting for theological dissension, a whole complex of warring ideologies. Accordingly, the story of 1692 is of far more than antiquarian interest: it is an allegory of our times. One would like to believe that leaders of the modern world can in the end deal with delusion as sanely and courageously as the men of old Massachusetts dealt with theirs.

It is a cool English day as John Alden, a twenty-one-year-old barrel maker and carpenter, stands at the rail of the merchant ship Mayflower, watching the chaos on the wharf just below. He is about to risk his life on an extremely dangerous voyage. What he sees terrifies him

One last time, Bridget pleads her innocence, begging for help. The last thing she sees before the burlap sack is placed over her head is the pious and bearded Reverend Hale, a 56 year old pastor grasping his bible as if it were a weapon. It is a beautiful spring morning. The sun is shining. A sign of God's approval. A ladder is put below the thick branch of an old oak tree. Two men lift Bridget onto it. She feels the noose as it is placed over her head, then tightened around her neck. Suddenly, the ladder is kicked out from beneath her. Bridget slowly strangles. Kicking out hard with her legs, then she is still. The crowd approves. They are safer now. But in reality, no one is safe in Salem.

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.

Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. New York: Routledge, 1996. Ray, Benjamin. “The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village.” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2008): 449–78. Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rosenthal, Bernard, Gretchen A. Adams, et al., eds. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner, 1971. Trask, Richard B. The Devil Hath Been Raised: A Documentary History of the Salem Village Witchcraft Outbreak of March 1692: Together with a Collection of Newly Located and Gathered Witchcraft Documents. Danvers, MA: Yeoman Press, 1997. Weisman, Richard. Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

Our ancestors had a highly developed appreciation of the value of condiments. In a Salem inventory at a somewhat later date appear salt, pepper, ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon, nutmegs, and allspice.

As accused Lancashire woman Margaret Johnson explained in 1633, whenever Witches desired to be somewhere, they would be transported in spirit upon a rod, dog, or other such item.69 The meeting itself often took place outside and in liminal settings such as churchyards (between the living and dead), mountaintops (between the land and sky), and fields (between one property and another). In many cases, these settings appeared as Otherworldly parallels to locations in the Midworld. It was claimed, for instance, that the accused Witches of Salem, Massachusetts, convened for their Sabbath in the Reverend Samuel Parris’s pasture.70 Meanwhile, the Witches of German folklore were said to gather on the Brocken, which is the highest peak of the Harz Mountains.71

The epicenter of what became known as “rubber fever” was Salem, Massachusetts, north of Boston. In 1825 a young Salem entrepreneur imported five hundred pairs of rubber shoes from Brazil. Ten years later, the number of imported shoes had grown to more than 400,000, about one for every forty Americans

And so it is that towns like Salem evolve into hotbeds of rabid religiosity. There is no dissent. The townspeople do what they are told. Ironically, superstition—which is the opposite of faith—is deeply ingrained in the population. The Puritan leadership has absolute power. And, as the adage goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In efforts to restore us to primitive Christianity, in all the simplicity in which it came from the lips of Jesus. Had it never been sophisticated by the subtleties of commentators, nor paraphrased into meanings totally foreign to its character, it would at this day have been the religion of the whole civilized world. But … the maniac ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded it with absurdities and incomprehensibilities, as to drive into infidelity men who had not time, patience, or opportunity to strip it of its meretricious trappings, and to see it in all its native simplicity and purity. I trust however that the same free exercise of private judgment which gave us our political reformation will extend its effects to that of religion.

Proctor’s body was thrown in the crevice on Gallows Hill like the rest of the victims. Also, like the bodies of many of the victims, his was supposed to have been rescued under cover of night by family to be buried anonymously and respectfully on his own land. Which today is a median on an off-ramp.

if thou hast but one Tear in thy Eyes, if thou hast but one prayer in thy heart, spend it now.

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

Eu já havia me arrependido de ter apenas, em todo esse caso, interpretado um papel de comparsa, rapidamente esquecida e cujo destino não interessava a ninguém. "Tituba, uma escrava de Barbados que provavelmente praticava hoodoo." Algumas linhas em longos tratados dedicados aos eventos de Massachusetts. Por que eu deveria ser ignorada? Essa questão também atravessou meu espírito. É porque ninguém se preocupa com uma negra, com seus sofrimentos e suas tribulações? É isso? Eu procuro a minha história junto às histórias das Bruxas de Salem e não a encontro.

Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And “Tabitha” would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches.

The girl who was to bloom into a night flower was one of four sisters reared by their mother in Salem, Massachusetts. About the time the war broke out, when she was in her middle teens, Betty Short went to work. She ushered in theaters, she slung plates as a waitress. It was the kind of work where a girl too young and attractive would meet too many men.

We have robots on Mars and supercomputers in our pockets, and people are still afraid of the hoodoo.

James Russell Lowell will claim, “The little shipload of outcasts who landed at Plymouth are destined to influence the future of the world.

Things were looking so bleak for the Red Sox that, following their 10th straight loss on May 11, a Boston radio station flew a genuine Salem witch to Cleveland in an attempt to snap the losing streak. Laurie Cabot, a 42-year-old teacher of “Witchcraft as a Science” at Massachusetts’s Salem State College, had been similarly pressed