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What do the authors mean when they write in the Preface: “it is precisely because [the people of Salem Village] were so unexceptional that their lives (and, for that matter, the trauma that overwhelmed them in 1692) are invested with real historical significance”? What is significant about the “ordinary” and the “unexceptional”, both generally, and in the specific case of Salem Village?
Students might, to begin, cite the larger passage from which the excerpt in the question was taken (“...except for a brief moment, the inhabitants of Salem Village were ‘ordinary’ people, too, living out their lives in an obscure seventeenth-century farming village. Had it not been for...
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