Ironically, Salem is remembered less as the site where the colony of Massachusetts was first established, with the most elevated of intentions, than as the place where just sixty years later Puritan self-righteousness reached its apogee in the horrific witch trials of 1692. While the town itself was to prosper as a port - as evidenced by its fine old buildings - the witch scare did much to discredit the idea that the New World conducted its affairs on a different moral plane than the Old. Nineteen Salem women were hanged as witches (and one man, Giles Corry, pressed to death with a boulder), thanks to a group of impressionable teenage girls who reported as truth a garbled mixture of fireside tales told by a West Indian slave, Tituba, and half-digested scare stories published by Cotton Mather, a pillar of the Puritan community. Hotels in Salem |
ROOMS USA
