Word: salems
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Young Ideas. In Salem. Mass...
Home Place. In Salem, Ore., released after serving a term for auto theft, Joseph Trapp was arrested as he drove by the state prison "to see what the pen looks like from the outside," admitted that he had stolen the car, explained: "I would have been arrested for vagrancy anyhow...
...increasing distrust of the trial procedures came in the middle of June when, with several other ministers, he responded to a request for advice from the judges. The group of ministers suggested that the courts evaluate carefully the so-called "spectral evidence"--that given by the afflicted girls of Salem; no one was quite ready yet to dispute directly the testimony of the girls, but their conduct was now an object of suspicion. On August 1, the Cambridge Ministerial Association, of which Mather was the most prominent member, met in the old Harvard Hall to discuss the matter further...
...story of Increase Mather's courageous fight for deconey and sanity, history adds a bizarre note of irony. A few years after the trials, a book appeared in Boston which denounced Cotton Mather, Increase's son, for his part in the Salem witch-hunts. But although Cotton's son, for his part in the Salem witch-hunts. But although Cotton's role had, in fact, been at best a rather ambiguous one. Increase reseswiftly and violently to his son's defense. Legend has it that a curious ceremony took place in Cambridge a few days after the appearance...
Mather's statement, which quickly circulated in the leading circles of the colony and was published in book form within a month, broke the back of the witchcraft hysteria. Several weeks later, the court which had tried the Salem cases adjourned, never to sit again. No more executions took place in the colony of Massachusetts; the following spring, Governor Phips pardoned 150 people who had been imprisoned on witchcraft charges. The fury of the mania subsided as quickly as it had come, when Puritan good sense re-asserted itself. Soon the witchcraft trials were but an ugly memory, though Puritanism...