Social Issues In The Salem Witch Trials

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Salem Village, Massachusetts was the home of a Puritan community with a strict moral code through 1691. No one could have ever anticipated the unexplainable events that were to ambush the community’s stability. The crisis that took place in Salem in 1962 still remains a mystery, but the accusations made by the young girls could be a result of ergot poisoning or the need for social power; this leads the people of Salem to succumb to the genuine fear of witchcraft. Trials regarding the witchcraft began at the dawn of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, were said to be bewitched. Salem, a village that homes nearly 2,000 people, was surrounded by paranoia. Inhabitants were confined to their home during the winter …show more content…

According to Thaddeus Russell of a History.com video, this proves to be a problem to the community: The Salem Witch Trials really were about the fear of women, and really the fear of women’s independence. What they [the people of Salem] were seeing was people acting differently as settlements started to grow, and in particular (among girls and women), they started to behave in new and different ways that many men and women found threatening; they [the women] were interested in living not always according to Puritan values and so it’s not surprising that there was an attack on the devil within. In a recent study, Nicholas P. Spanos and Jack Gottlieb were able to study biological occurrences that could account for the mysterious behavior of the young girls. The two studied ergot, which is a fungus that can infest rye and other cereal grains under specific conditions. The two discovered that when ingested, the ergotized grain may produce a remarkable amount of symptoms including, but not limited …show more content…

Realism can be seen through the Salem Witch Trials because some scholars believe that the girls were only doing it to seek power and attention. They accused people and saw that their accusations held great power so they kept doing it for two reasons. The first is because they were in too deep to turn back and tell everyone they were lying and the second is that they were acting in their own self-interest (another characteristic of realism). This society was also suffering because they had a security dilemma. They felt unsafe from the Native Americans that lived in the woods and they felt that the natives had a power/weapon that they didn’t possess—the power of Satan. Some scholars could even argue that the Salem Witch Trials were a violation of human rights to those were murdered because they were not killed under reasonable circumstances. Many international scholars have different thoughts of the international system on why it happened. The Salem Witch Trials were an awful part of history in

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