Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other.

The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.

It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse. Vowell has a very specific authorial voice, irreverent and wisecracking, which enlivens her cleverly worked out presentation of facts, but it isn't for everyone.Īnne Payne organizes the Jax Freestyle Book Club for Real Readers at Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials. The complicated origins and workings of the French alliance with the aspiring United States (the basic 'Great Britain is our common enemy' motive is obvious, but getting the cooperation treaty, to say nothing of actual cooperation, in place was a huge ongoing feat of diplomacy by Benjamin Franklin and others) are explained in a voice that is sometimes quirkily personal, sometimes straight storytelling generously augmented by quotes from letters, journals and official reports. battle sites and talked to history-loving locals, including reenactors, to create a contemporary framework for Lafayette's adventures. The book then swoops back to Lafayette's early life as France's richest orphan, his shocking decision at 19 to leave his pregnant wife and risk life and limb in a land where he had no ties, and his many years of devoted service to the revolutionary cause are set out with clarity and humor.

Thus, the return of Lafayette was a huge, momentarily unifying national event that led directly to the naming of the Lafayettes, Fayettes, and Fayettevilles that dot our map. For generations raised on tales of the Revolutionary glory, the deflating dying off of its heroes revealed something familiar to us in 2015: The young country's regions and factions didn't much care for each other. Her book opens in 1824, when the elderly Marquis made a triumphal return tour of his old stomping grounds. Vowell explicitly seeks to flesh out our bare-bones knowledge.

The witches salem 1692 review