After having read Captors and Captives, a new book about the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, Jay Fitzgerald at Hub Blog is looking for book recommendations about the Salem Witch Trials. Someone has already responded with Nissenbaum and Boyer's Salem Possessed, which is an excellent recommendation although I would read it in conjunction with Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. For those interested in pre-Revolution New England, I have a few other suggestions.
Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity examines the Algonquian Indian uprising in New England during the years 1675-76. More importantly, Lepore explores the meanings attached by both sides to the events of the war in the following decades, meanings which have reverberated to our own time. It was out of King Philip's War that the captivity narrative appears, a soon to be standard colonial literary genre in which an settler woman is kidnapped and lives amongst her captors, returning later to "civilization". The captivity narrative would be stood on its head by the experience of Eunice Williams, the daughter of John Williams, a minister killed in the Deerfield Indian attack of 1704. Eunice Williams chose to remain with her captors, to the dismay of New Englanders. Her experiences can be found in John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America.
Another book (a set of three books, actually) which should be looked at is New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century. This is the catalog of a 1982 Museum of Fine Arts exhibition with hundreds of illustrations of the material culture--maps, furniture, clothing, silver, tools, etc.--of early New England along with essays on a variety of subjects and detailed descriptions of the objects pictured. It is unfortunately out of print, very rare, and very expensive. I've only seen the set in a used bookstore once, the Bryn Mawr Bookshop in Cambridge where it was inexplicably priced at $9. You won't find a better introduction to colonial new England.
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