Study Questions for “Salem’s Dark Hour”

1. If you saw Sarah Good today, walking down the street, muttering and cursing (probably pushing a shopping cart), what would be your diagnosis?

2. What is a “bodice”? (Look it up. We still have dictionaries in this school.) What color was Bridget Bishop’s bodice?

3. What was her “specter” accused of doing? (How is that related to her bodice?)

4. When the girls of Salem (mostly poor girls working as servants) first met with Tituba (the Reverend Samuel Parris’s slave), what were they hoping to get from her?

5. Why, does the article suggest, Tituba gave what we would now regard as obviously false testimony about her encounters with the Devil?

6. What theories have been suggested over the years as being responsible for the strange behavior of the Salem girls?

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7. John Demos, an esteemed colonial historian from Yale University, offers what description of a typical New England witch? (And they were not confined to Salem. Witches were tried in Hartford, Windsor, and Farmington. Gallows Hill in Hartford in on the present day site of Trinity College.)

8. According to Cotton Mather, what proof is needed to condemn a witch?

9. In Salem, however, the judges decided to allow “spectral evidence”. What is spectral evidence?

10. What part did the Putnam clan play in the witch trials (particularly as regards the Porter family)?

11. A person who confessed to witchcraft showed his/her good intent, and would not be executed. (He would, however, have to forfeit his property.) Nevertheless, some people, like Rebecca Nurse, refused to falsely confess. Why?

12. What was the “common sin” of many of the New England witches, according to Carol Karlsen?

13. What group in Salem made three-fourths of the accusations against witches?

14. What did many of the accusing girls have in common?

15. How did Increase Mather feel about the possibility of innocent people being put to death?

16. When certain conditions prevail in society, the likelihood of “witchhunts” increases? What are those conditions?

17. How did those conditions express themselves in the 1950’s? In the 1980’s?

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