The situation in which we find ourselves is brought out with dramatic force in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which deals with the Salem witch trials.

* 1612 – The " Samlesbury witches ", three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, are put on trial, accused for practicing witchcraft, one of the most famous witch trials in English history.

* 1692 – Salem witch trials: in Salem, Massachusetts, Province of Massachusetts Bay, five people, one woman and four men, including a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft.

Other historical events that form a part of American folklore include: the Salem witch trials, the Boston Massacre, the Siege of Yorktown, California Gold Rush, Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and The Wreck Of The SS Edmund Fitzgerald

The witch trials of the 17th century claimed hundreds of victims in Bamberg, reaching a climax between 1626 and 1631, under the rule of Prince-Bishop Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim.

1678, Harvard College ; A. M. 1681, honorary doctorate 1710, University of Glasgow ) was a socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister, prolific author and pamphleteer ; he is often remembered for his role in the Salem witch trials.

The unease and self-deception that characterized that period of colonial history would be revisited in many forms at political and social moments of crisis ( such as the Salem witch trials, which coincided with frontier warfare and economic competition among Indians and French and other European settlers ) and during lengthy periods of cultural definition ( such as the American Renaissance of the late 18th-and early 19th-century literary, visual, and architectural movements, which sought to capitalize on unique American identities ).

Sir William Phips, governor of the newly chartered Province of Massachusetts Bay, appointed his lieutenant governor, William Stoughton, as head of a special witchcraft tribunal and then as chief justice of the colonial courts, where he presided over the witch trials.

Bancroft notes that Mather considered witches " among the poor, and vile, and ragged beggars upon Earth ," and Bancroft asserts that Mather considered the people against the witch trials to be witch advocates.

The book contained a few of Mather ’ s sermons, the conditions of the colony and a description of witch trials in Europe.

Category: People of the Salem witch trials

Murray used 16th to 17th century French sources on supposed Witches ' Sabbaths in the context of the European witch trials to " reconstruct " a Witch Cult in Western Europe.

* 1621 – Rebecca Nurse, English colonist executed during Salem witch trials ( d. 1692 )

The European nation that proved the exception to this however was the highly-literate Iceland, where a third of the 134 witch trials held here involved people who had owned grimoires.

However, amongst much of Europe, belief in magic and witchcraft persisted, as did the witch trials in certain areas.

* 1692 – Salem witch trials: Bridget Bishop is hanged at Gallows Hill near Salem, Massachusetts, for " certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft & Sorceries ".

* 1636 – John Hale, American pastor during the Salem witch trials ( d. 1700 )

* 1692 – Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts.

* 1675 – Mary Walcott, American accuser at the Salem witch trials ( d. 1719 )

* 1701 – William Stoughton, American judge at the Salem witch trials ( b. 1631 )

* 1653 – Sarah Good, American woman accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials ( d. 1692 )

John and Priscilla had the following children who survived to adulthood: Elizabeth, John ( accused during the Salem witch trials ), Joseph, Priscilla, Robert, Jonathan, Sarah, Ruth, Mary, Rebecca, and David.

* 1692 – Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials.

Primarily known for her work in Egyptology, which was " the core of her academic career ," she is also known for her propagation of the Witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials in the Early Modern period of Christianized Europe and North America were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion devoted to a Horned God.

Subsequent historians examining the Early Modern witch trials, particularly Carlo Ginzburg, Eva Pocs and Emma Wilby have also emphasised that the accounts in many of the witch trials represent visionary experiences, containing within them imaginary and surreal elements, which goes against Murray's rationalization of the trial accounts.

As soon as Murray published her theory she received criticism from other historians who had studied the Early Modern witch trials.

Early zombie films like Victor Halperin's White Zombie ( 1932 ) and Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie ( 1943 ) concerned living people enslaved by a Voodoo witch doctor ; many were set in the Caribbean.

The word " sabbat " itself comes from the witches ' sabbath or sabbat attested to in Early Modern witch trials.

The intellectual and spiritual tensions erupted in the Early Modern witch craze, further reinforced by the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation, especially in Germany, England, and Scotland.

The 17th century saw the gradual rise of the " age of reason ", while belief in witchcraft and sorcery, and consequently the irrational surge of Early Modern witch trials, receded, a process only completed at the end of the Baroque period circa 1730.

During the Early Middle Ages, the Church did not conduct witch trials.

It was not unique, being an American example of the much larger phenomenon of witch trials in the Early Modern period, but many have considered the lasting impressions from the trials to have been highly influential in subsequent American history.

Early press releases stated that Vincent Furnier's stage and band name " Alice Cooper " was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th century witch with that name.

In the British accounts from the Early Modern period at least, there were three main types of encounter narrative related to how a witch or cunning person first met their familiar.

Early on in the series, Prue is regarded as the most powerful witch of the Halliwell sisters.

The witch trials in Early Modern Europe are at least indirectly related to this revival of scholarly interest in the occult.

Skeptics argue that the demonization of Western esotericism by conspiracy theorists is rooted in religious intolerance but also in the same moral panics that have fueled witch trials in the Early Modern period, and satanic ritual abuse allegations in the United States.

Early in the novel, Tiffany Aching leaves her home in the chalk country ( based on England ’ s chalk country ) to act as an apprentice and maid for the elderly witch Miss Level.

These spirits, which were also believed to work for witches as well, are referenced in many of the witch trial records from the Early Modern period.

During the witch trials of Early Modern Europe, many practitioners of folk magic that did not see themselves as witches, but as healers or seers, were convicted of witchcraft ( Éva Pócs ' " sorcerer witches "): many English " witches " convicted of consorting with demons seem to have been cunning folk whose fairy familiars had been demonised, and over half the accused witches in Hungary seem to have been healers.

In 1962, Valiente saw her first book published: entitled Where Witchcraft Lives, it dealt with her own research into folklore and the Early Modern witch trials that occurred in her county of Sussex, things which she incorrectly associated with the origins of Wicca.

By the Early Modern period, folkloric stories had grown up around the Stones, telling of how they had once been a king and his knights who had been turned to stone by a witch ; such stories continued to be taught amongst local people well into the 19th century.

Gerald Gardner believed that the New Forest coven was a survival of the Witch-Cult, a pre-Christian pagan religion that worshipped a Horned God and a Triple Goddess and which had been persecuted during the witch trials of the Early Modern period.

The idea of the pagan Witch-Cult has been disproved and dismissed by historians specialising in the Early Modern witch trials since Murray's death in 1963, with works by academics like Elliot Rose, Norman Cohn, Carlo Ginzburg and Keith Thomas instead showing the real nature of the witch trials as a combination of social, economic and religious factors.

Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, the Benandanti were tried as heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition, and their beliefs assimilated to Satanism.