Historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed was published in 1974 to great acclaim; it is considered a landmark work of social history and a core part of the extensive body of work on the Salem Witch Trials. They root the hysteria in internal divisions among Salem Village and Salem Town, as well as the underlying tensions due to the progression of the society from agrarian to urban and commercial.
One of the notable aspects of the work is its reliance on sources that historians of Salem had not often consulted prior to Salem Possessed. Robert Middlekauff explains, “The sources used are more varied than those employed by any student of Salem. Besides the sermons still in manuscript, Boyer and Nissenbaum have studied voting records, tax assessments, lists of public officials, and petitions transcribed in church records and in the Massachusetts archives. For data on families they turned to these sources, and to wills, deeds, inventories, and court records, among other materials.”
The work originated in a laboratory course at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Fall 1969. Boyer and Nissenbaum discovered manuscript records of the First Church of Danvers and then began looking into maps of Salem Village and real estate holdings. They sketched a map out, which was a “eureka moment” for them. They planned to publish an article in William and Mary Quarterly, but eventually realized it would need to be a book. In a 2008 article in that same magazine, the two historians wrote, “when we finally completed Salem Possessed in late 1972—that article had long since outgrown itself—we knew we had written a good book. We still think so today, thirty-six years later.”
The work was acclaimed in the scholarly community and won the American Historical Society’s John H. Dunning Prize and was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award.
