Salem Witch Trials Dbq

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The Salem Witch Trials

The first arrival of the Puritans was in the 1600s. They came within a large number of English immigrants arriving in New England. Puritans traveled this far way across the Atlantic Ocean to practice Christianity in pure ways. The land in New England was hard and rocky, but they were committed to living here and had help from God, as spoken in the Bible. The Bible stated that the Puritans believed, but another subject that was spoken from the Bible was the Devil. They said he could enter a person’s body and turn that person into a witch. If your under his power, then you would make all kinds of trouble, like cause a cow to run away. Soon later in the late 1600’s witchcraft was a popular, serious, crime and many …show more content…

This then caused them to ingest these hallucinogens which may have caused them to act so strangely during this time. The second theory is that there were power struggles between the poor and wealthy at the villages. This can be seen by Document E which shows the map of Salem Village in the year 1692. On the map there are 33 accusers and 6 defenders on the poorer side of town. On the wealthier side of town there are only 2 accusers with 26 defenders! This proves that more people were accused on the richer side of town. This might have been caused because the poorer people wanted more land, political power, and to be more wealthy. The third theory is that there was paranoia within the people due to Indian raids. With the upcoming war of the Indians people were suspicious of others. “During this time Puritans viewed the Indians as devil worshippers and afterwards nightmares of the war remained and people of Salem were seeing Indians in every dark alley and every corner.” (Elbert, 3). With the people becoming suspicious of others they might have thought that if a person did one bad thing that they were possessed by the Devil and were a

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