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Stacy Schiff and Caitlin Flanagan on The Witches: Salem 1692

Ticket: $20 ticket only. $36 book (pick up at will call) with ticket. Books cannot be mailed.

Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Cleopatra and the recent The Witches: Salem 1692, digs into one of our most mythologized and sensational crime waves in America: Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. It was a most stressful time in American history-- fealty to the English king, a nightmare of hardship, almost constant battle in the Indian wars, near constant starvation. And those were the good days. Schiff writes history like a master of the thriller-- she gives us context, introduces us to the characters, and sets the story. What we have is religious zealotry, girls and women acting strangely, and adolescents suddenly defying adults. The untoward behavior amid terrible daily tragedy unleashed panic. Suspicion. Soon neighbors rallied against neighbors, and families against themselves. A town lathered itself in a fit of mass hysteria, egged on by their pastors-- who exercised enormous local authority. The subsequent accusations were terrifying to many, empowering to some, and ultimately damning to 19 men and women and a few dogs over the course of one very bad year.

Caitlin Flanagan is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, and has published numerous essays on sexual abuse in elite schools; on icons such as Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe; and two books, including Girl Land and To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.