Many newly transcribed ivy teams many newly transcribed by the teams members. Margo burns welcome back. Should be a really interesting session. I would like to introduce to you my good friend and partner in which graph studies, margo burns. Margo was one of the leading experts on the trials. One of the leading experts in the salem witch hunt. She probably has forgotten more about the individual documents than i will ever know. We asked her to speak about those records and the Amazing Things you can learn from a close read of them. I should also mention that he that she is the author of my favorite article on the trials. It looks at the issue of false confession that i strongly recommend to you. Margo burns. Just so you know, i have a completely different read on the coercion of false confessions that he gave a few minutes ago. Read my article and you will find out. I am here today primarily to talk about the actual documents. And how do we know what we know. When ever i read or hear anything about the salem witchcraft trials, i tried to go back to the primary source. This is records of salem witchhunts. A dream of size of paper. It comes in paperback now. Of paper. It comes in paperback now. If you are serious about studying regarding the trials, i highly recommend you getting one. I do not get a penny in revenue from it because we had to split it 12 ways. The history of this book Bernard Rosenthal absolutely amazing man. A literary critic who is the head of the English Department at binghamton using a at binghamton university. He is also very interested in social justice. He thought there was a great injustice that happened here. He began to read the primary sources because that is what literary people do. The end result was the salem stories. He also discovered a lot of mistakes in the transcriptions of the documents. He got caught up in a couple of them. He thought it would be nice to fix them and that is when he embarked on this project. He did not realize it would take this long. It took 12 of us 10 years. Book, and it was heavy, i thought is that all it is . We had taken so long. Including ernie, the first project manager was supposed to be joe, a longtime professor at salem state who tragically passed away just as the project was starting. I dont really know how it happened but it happened that bernie found me right as he was about to start work on this and he took a huge chance on me. It worked out well. When we talk about the 12 people. Sixother 10 include linguists from scandinavia. Why a linguist . They can read old handwriting. They are used to dealing with primary sources that are hand written. He was in finland. The first person he spoke with was a linguist interested in reading the transcripts of the interrogations. And he said he knew where they were, in helsinki. The next person he spoke about was from the university of helsinki. One of his colleagues, who is now in sweden. The three of them came on and they each brought a younger colleague. It was an interesting crowd to work with. I had a mastery in linguistics so i could interpret. People are interested in literature but we did not have a lot of common ground. We also had some americans including gretchen adams. We also had benjamin ray. The e versionand gives you a portal into his website. Richard trafton. Lyn. Our very own mary she is the person. A very been doing this long time. She knows so much and has looked at everything. She was invaluable in this. She ended up writing the thumbnail bios for everyone in the book, a herculean task. We are very indebted to her. The whole team was an amazing thing. And the fact that we finished it in less than a decade was amazing. Already given us an overview. I would like to talk about the actual documents. If we are going to talk about what happened, if you have ever heard me talk before, i do go in depth into what it took documented in document wise. There are three phases to any case. First, the investigation, when someone would complain. I do straight would send out a warrant and the person would be interrogated. Sometimes in public and sometimes in private. If there were grounds to hold them over, they would hold them over and then a jury of inquest, a grand jury, would be called to look for facts. They would summons people. They would have had bodies examined. They would look, especially at witchcraft trials, they would look for witches teats. In the 1600s, a woman was , having a infanticide bastardized and killing it. Required a jury of women to examine her body and they said that she had never given birth. This was the kind of thing that they typically would do. Finders of facts. After the inquest, the grand jury could decide whether the charges were true or not. This is when the actual charges were being made. They would write up an indictment specifying those things. And the grand jury would look at it and say we believe this is a true bill. The crime took place and so there is good reason to go to andl or they would say no, they would write ignoramus. If they wanted it to be age group built on the indictment, it would go on to prosecution. You would be arraigned and you could plead guilty or not guilty. Most people do not know but four people pled guilty. They did not have trials. They went right to sentencing. When you he or the story about giles getting pressed to death, there is another phase at the hearing witches you had to agree to the tried before god in the country. The country being the jury. Giles said no and that put things to a halt. Into it a monkeywrench which they found very strange to find thatd them strange torturous death, they pressed him to death. Everyone tried at the salem trials were found guilty. And you would be executed unless you were pregnant. Pled guilty, you would have some time to make your case make your peace with god. This last one was the death warrant for bishop. The seal was from william stoughton. That is the basic thumb now for a case. About this, we looked at all of the documents. The original manuscripts are in 12 different archives. When we started, the one on the left is a digitized image from microfilm. If you go to mass archives to see documents, they point you to microfilm first. Who hade it was ben ray all of the microfilm digitized. Quiver. E my heart go a these were not great though. And i went to a lot of trouble to go back to the library where most of the documents are and photograph and scanned them. You can see a big difference. The one on the right was one of the indictments for rebecca. You can see that it is nice and bright. There were two colors of ink. It was immediately apparent to us that would not have been from microfilm. Guess what even in those days, those documents could be boiler plates. One person would make the boilerplate and someone else would fill it in. They were all handwritten. Those were the things we could see when we looked at the actual manuscripts. , aume 135 was an actual book bound book of documents. You would have a page with a cutout and they would put the manuscript in between two layers of silk. You could page through them. The microfilm they did not even have the master anymore. Just the one in circulation. You can see that it was horrible. Poor gretchen she was trying from the east. Finally, i went down and got permission. The people in the archives of all of these places were fabulous. I photographed them all. They were all still in the book. I had to shoot and shoot. The most recent time i was there, they had taken apart the book and put each one in their own archival photo. They are still in silk. The soaking goes over the wax seal. Not optimal but preserved. This allowed us to utter transcriptions. In addition to original manuscripts, there were a lot of things out there facsimiles of manuscripts and we did not know where they were. The one on the left is a negative photostat of the interrogation of Abigail Hobbs. In the early 1920s, a lot of people had interesting old documents and they would go to libraries that had a photo static copier. They would offer a copy. The positive of this one is at the historical society. They have a collection there of records. The book at the massachusetts state archives when i opened it up, this fell out. It was tucked inside. I knew exactly what it was. Who knew it was here . I was hoping it was something we had not found yet. The middle one is from a 1936 catalog selling this document for 85. If you remember in the news a couple of years ago, there was another witchcraft trial document that came up for auction for about 30,000. Think of the investment of 85. The one on the end was from a 1904 book. While we were working on it, tracked it down at the university of michigan. We do not know where that document for Abigail Hobbs is. There is a little bit of providence at the Massachusetts Historical Society but not much. We also discovered that we had handwritten extemporaneous copies of things. On the left we had one and on of theht is an account same interrogation. Both in the handwriting of Samuel Parris. We do not know why there are two versions accept he was taking things down in shorthand and then reconstituted them into his account. Shorthand was useful for a young minister because they could listen to some of the matter and use shorthand to take down absolutely everything and then reconstitute it. That is one reason why we know so much about Salem Village, innocence as of because Samuel Parris took it all down. There is a reason why Arthur Miller coached from him poached from him. All of the descriptions come from Samuel Parris because he was reconstituting it from his shorthand. If i could find one of those documents i would love the shorthand of that. He would make two copies. We also had some handwritten, contemporaneous copies. On the left, clearly a first draft. Several people crossing things out and adding. And the cleaned up copy on the right. The challenge is that the markup on the bottom of the left one, the messy one, looked like a mark from the person signing it. It looks like that is the actual signed one but the other one is cleaned up. Why we have these two copies, we are not sure. We also have some later, handwritten copies. The one on the left is a tracing of one of the documents that was out in public for a long time. The original is pretty tattered. I was looking at it and said it but it isme as other not fluent. I held it out. Document. D traced the this is in a different archive, the Boston Public Library. Copy ofnd one is a Samuel Parrisinterrogation. It maintains the same line structure and layout on the page that it was done later. There are Little Things with theierrata. And on the far right is another copy of some of the old records. These thingsse out. There are also things we do not have manuscripts for. These are published transcriptions of documents. The one on the far left is lawsons account of a day in april in 1862 when he went to find out if his wife was murdered. That came out pretty quickly. There was a lot of information on that. The next one is a decree from 1692. Those things would be written out and eventually published. 1700hird one over is from when he is describing a lot of things and taking to task everyone involved. There are things there that we do not have any original manuscripts. When up or that Rebecca Nurse was originally found not guilty, this is how we know. We have accounts there from her and the jury foreman saying they were pressured to go back and bring her in guilty. The last one is a page from thomas hutchisons history in the 18th century. He had taken a lot of the original meniscus home and he was writing a history of massachusetts. There, he has transcriptions of all sorts of documents that we do not have now. One was the sam riot. His whole house was trampled. I have heard maybe it is fake news his library was trampled and some of the draft pages still were dirty. Everything. D a lot of these documents disappeared. Inone point, in the 1900 the 1800s, there was a man named will that discovered they had an earlier draft of this book. In that, there were snippets of other documents. We are slowly but surely putting together all of these pieces. In 1840, thomas gage published a history of raleigh, massachusetts in which they have nine documents of the case of Margaret Scott. Our grid scott was executed. I bet very few of you even know who she was. Nine available to tell her case. And two of them are in the Essex County Court archives. Are in private collections. If you are about an auction of one, those are the two indictments that pop up but there are five more. Where are they . Are at the Boston Public Library. After our book was published, we were trying to figure out if we could identify more of the handwriting in these documents. We did archive hopping for two weeks. We went to the Boston Public Library to go to the rare books room to see if they had any contemporaneous manuscripts. Doing this in our book. At one point, we were looking up at it all of the towns. We opened up one of the card catalog. Card catalog. Ok. March, may 12, five years ago, card catalog. We were looking up rowley. And we wondered what this meant. Four documents in the case of Margaret Scott. My heart skipped a beat. Out that these are four of the five that we did not know where they were. We were really looking at the manuscripts, it was really nice to see the handwriting. Quite often, these older transcriptions did not look at every marker on a manuscript. Sometimes, on the back, they would not copy that stuff but we did. We were trying to figure out the date, and who wrote it. Is bernie big things was determined to set it up chronologically. As thedwriting came second thing. When we were all transcribing, if you have a document with this much of someones hand writing, and you have an ambiguous area where you do not know what it says, it would be helpful if you had a couple of pages of someones hand writing to compare and resolve the ambiguity. We started sorting early on so we could keep track of whos handwriting was where. We spent some time with the documents. We could identify some peoples handwriting. But we wanted more. This gave us a little more information. Just a side note, pedro went back about a week later and they could not find them. And they were very apologetic. Remember, this was around the time that Margaret Scott indictment had just gone up for auction bringing in about 30,000. A month past, i made a call. They were really ticked at me. We told you we would let you know. Every day that passes is not good. I pushed. I was homesick for a couple of days and made some phone calls. Sure enough, i went up the chain. By the end of the day, they had gone through and found them. She called me back. A few years later, when you heard about the rembrandt that had gone missing. Front page of the boston globe. It was worth a half million dollars. And they lost them. I thought they had just michelle helved them. It caused a lot of tumbled at the Boston Public Library. Tumult ated a lot of the Boston Public Library. I double checked yesterday and it turns out that their rare book and Manuscript Department is closed until 2019 as they read inventory and do reinv entory and make improvements. How long did we have to wait for access to the Philips Library contents . There were other transcriptions going on and Arthur Miller probably used these. This was a page and woodwards crew went through and transcribed most of the stuff that was in the Essex County Court archives. This is a page from the examination. Drama. S like i want to draw attention to this one. Where someone was saying there were two rats. Some of the stuff i had been reading had said they were talking about rats and cats. That is odd. Here is a little piece from the document. Rat and a red black rat. There was another account of this examination. And this one was written in the hand of ezekiel from Salem Village. This one is at the new york Public Library in the Thomas Madigan collection. These old libraries often started these rare book collections. This was jonathans account. If we zoom in here, i saw two cats, one red and one black. What did they do . One said cap and one said rats. Did they hear it differently . Tried to resolve it by saying they saw both. A kind of looked like the word rats. Until you look at some of these other things. These are unambiguous references from that letter. Ezekiel was hearing the word cats but there are transcriptions out there that say the word rats. We also encountered some other things. This was a piece in thomas handwriting. Iked at it and thought see a calendar. The 15th of may was a sunday. Why would they do an examination on a sunday . I looked at it again and thought it might be the 11th. I went on a search for more examples of his handwriting and two at that his five has strokes. And his unambiguous one, he made curly ones. Wecorrected that date but had to make a case for everything that we did. Sometimes we called them recorders or scribes. Database. Hole we had examples of different peoples handwriting. And then we had some profiles with some of the peters that helped us recognize that persons handwriting and a list of the thatents that included persons handwriting so we could refer to it to make our transcriptions better. That was the original reason for doing it. I had so information, we decided we had to share. You can see in some cases we identify the location of different handwritings. A little more detail in some of these transcriptions. , about 24 or 25 people that we came up with and identified in the book. But we found over 200 very and variant hands as we went through. Many of them had unusual names. When we were doing our archive hopping, i was determined to was. Mine who scribe w if you look at some of the older transcriptions of things, a have transcribed it as a w. I want to know who he is. It was someone involved in the grand jury proceedings. We do not know who he is. We have found his writing in other contemporaneous documents. We were looking at the features of a particular hand these are shot