![]() ![]() Neither is Miller concerned with historical truth when he suggests that hysteria arises because Samuel Parris catches his daughter, Betty, and his niece, Abigail, in the forest with Tituba, dancing and “traffick with spirits” (Miller 10). She goes so far as to say she put Betty under “the spell of an evil, thrilling dream” (30). Starkey suggests that, “in the absence of the elder Parrises, Tituba yielded to the temptation to show tricks and spells, fragments of something like voodoo remembered from the Barbados” (Starkey 30). She’s been immortalized in works such as Miller’s or Marion Starkey’s 1949 book The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials, both of which depict her as the cause, however unwittingly and indirectly, of the witch hunt. ![]() Some women, like Tituba, we barely remember at all, and what we do is hardly accurate. 2, by William Cullen Bryant, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1878, p. Alfred Fredericks, Designer Winham, Engraver – from “A Popular History of the United States”, Vol. We remember the initial accusers-Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, and others-as hysterical and attention-seeking, a view that Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible only solidified. As is often the case, the history surrounding this has not been kind to some of these women. ![]() The Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts are one of those dark spots of American history that continue to intrigue us even as they warn us about the dangers of mass hysteria and the necessity of due process. ![]()
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