What does the outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Salem tell us about the crisis of the late seventeenth-century?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The outbreak of witchcraft accusations reflected a sense of heightened anxiety that had engulfed colonists of Protestant New England, especially regarding the Puritans and their relations with their Indian neighbors. Colonists in Massachusetts had accused the Indians of using witchcraft against them. The purported occurrence of witchcraft that occurred in Salem was centered around a minister's daughter and her cousin, who accused two Salem women and Tituba (a Caribbean Indian slave) of practicing witchcraft. A main theme of the hysteria was that the Devil had taken the form of an American Indian. The Puritans compared the suffering that Satan inflicted on them with how the Indians tortured settlers in the brutal frontier war in Maine. Patterns in the witchcraft controversy indicate that those most often accused were women who did not fit the Puritan ideal of the pious, submissive female. This tells us that the crisis of the late seventeenth-century had a major impact on the Puritan colonists.