On trial. A book she discusses managed titled records of the salem witchhunt. 12 individuals worked to complete the book. This presentation is part of an all day Salem State University presentation. Host welcome back. I am thrilled to see you all here for what should be a really interesting session. I would like to introduce to you my good friend and partner in witchcraft studies, margo burns. Margo was one of the leading experts on the trials. One of the editors in the records of the salem witchhunt. In some degree, 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 she is the author of my favorite articles on the salem witch trials. It looks at the issue of false confession that i strongly recommend to you. Margo burns. [applause] thank you. Just so you know, i have a completely different read on the coercion of false confessions that he gave a few minutes ago. So 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. One of the things that had was thad was doing is whenever i read or hear anything about the salem witchcraft trials, i tried to go back to the primary source. This is records of the salem witchhunt. This is the size of a ream of paper. It comes in paperback now. If you are serious about studying the salem witchcraft trials, i highly recommend you getting one. There were so many of this doing it 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. He is a literary critic who is the head of the English Department at binghamton university. Melville scholar. Salem, he wasered also very interested in social justice. He thought there was a great injustice that happened here. As a literary critic he began to , read the primary sources because that is what literary , people do. You read and say what did they actually write. 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 said, well, it would be really nice to change and ask all of those things. That is when he embarked on this project. He did not realize it would take this long. He figured two or three years. It took 12 of us 10 years. When i saw this book, and it was heavy, i thought is that all it is . Because we had taken so long. Bernie 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. Later on he would say he knew what he was doing, no he didnt. It worked out well. Butit worked out well. When we talk about the 12 people. The other 10 include six linguists from scandinavia. Why a linguist . They can read old handwriting. They are historical linguists and 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. Got him on board. 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 was very happy i had a master in linguistics so i could interpret. Because people are interested in people interested in historical linguistics dont have a lot of common ground. We also had some americans including gretchen adams. We also had benjamin ray. You probably know the website at the university of he has a book virginia. And the e version gives you a portal into his website. Traft from danvers. And our very own marilyn. Whenink is just people say, you know more than anybody, i say no she is the , person. She has been doing this a very long time. She knows so much and has looked at everything. She was invaluable in this. She would say, oh, do you know about this document. She ended up writing the thumbnail bios for everyone in the book, a herculean task. So, 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. Thad has 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 document arywise to do i whole case. This is my one slide summary. There are three phases to any case. First, the investigation, when someone would complain. The magistrates send out a warrant and the person would be interrogated. Sometimes in public and sometimes in private. They decided 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 dead bodies examined. They would look, especially at witchcraft trials, they would look for witches there was an occasion in the 1600s, a woman was accused of infanticide, having a bastard child and killing it. Witchcraftn the trials, but they and paneled a jury of women to examine her body. And they said that she had never given birth. No baby, no death. This was the kind of thing that they typically would do. Finders of facts. In this case, especially looking for witches after the inquest, the grand jury could decide whether the charges were true or not. This is when the actual charges were being made. And 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, we think there is good reason to go to trial. Or they would say, well, no. My favorite was when they would write ignoramus. If they wanted it to be a true bill 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. But you could plead guilty or not guilty. When you hear the story about giles getting pressed to death, there is another phase at the hearings. You had to agree to be tried before god and the country. The country being the jury. Giles said no and that put things to a halt. Because it was all all the steps you would have to follow to do this. He threw a monkeywrench into it which they found very strange which prompted them to find that strange torturous death, they pressed him to death. Everyone tried at the salem trials was found guilty. And you would, within short order, be executed unless you were pregnant. If you pled guilty, you would have some time to make your peace with god. And do all of the things to clean up your act before they would execute you. This last one was the death warrant for bridget the ship. The seal was from william stoughton. He is the only one who signed it. That is the basic thumbnail now for a case. To learn about this, we looked at all of the documents. And the original manuscripts are in 12 different archives. When we first started out the , one on the left is a digitized image from microfilm. A lot of these things if you go to mass archives to see documents, they point you to microfilm first. Before you get to look at anything. I believe it was ben ray who had grant. E he is great at making grants. He had all of the microfilm digitized. That made my heart go a quiver. Oh, manuscripts. In short order, we are looking at these things and they are not great. So, ben 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. That was something immediately apparent to us that would not have been from microfilm. And sort of like, what is going on there. 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. But it is all handwritten. Those were the things we could see when we looked at the actual manuscripts. Volume 135 at the mass archives was actually a book a 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 see both sides, kind of. And you could page through them. But, the microfilm they did not even have the master anymore. They just had the one in circulation. You can see that it was horrible. Poor gretchen she was trying to transcribe from these. She was using photoshop and all sorts of things. Finally, i went down and got permission. The people in the archives of all of these places were fabulous. I photographed them all. At that point 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 its own archival folder. They are still in silk. The silk goes over the wax seal. Not optimal but preserved. This allowed us to make better 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. Well, what do we have this . In the early 1920s, a lot of people had interesting old documents, would go to libraries that had a photo static copier. They would say, i have this interesting document, you want a copy. The positive of this one is at the historical society. I already knew they have a collection there of records. The book at the massachusetts state archives when i opened it up to photograph those things this fell out. , it was tucked inside. Went, i know exactly what this is, but who knew it was here . I was hoping it was something we had not found yet. But no 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. It was an investment of 85. The one on the end was from a 1904 book. This is the only version we had of it. Kind of tattered. While we were working on it, dick trask tracked it down at the university of michigan. You never know in some cases where they are. 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 contemporaneous copies of things. So on the left we had one and on the right is basically an account of the same interrogation. Both in the handwriting of Samuel Parris. We have no idea 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, why we know so much about the pleas of innocence, because Samuel Parris took it all down. There is a reason why Arthur Miller poached from him. It reads like a plate. She says that, he says that. There is sound over here, we couldnt hear. 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 sometimes made make two copies. We also had some handwritten, contemporaneous copies. On the left, clearly a first draft. Several people crossing things out and adding things, 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. You didnt necessarily have your signature, you might have a mark. It looks like that is the actual signed one, but the other one is cleaned up. So, why we have these contemporaneous 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. But i was looking at it and said other but same as the , it is not fluent. I held them up. Someone had gone to the trouble to trace the document. This is in a different archive, the Boston Public Library. Y had theght the original manuscript, but who knows when this was done. The is a copy of Samuel Parris second one interrogation. It maintains the same line structure and layout on the page with the to dub with the two columns, but it was done later. There are Little Things with errata. And on the far right is another copy of some of the old records. On the far right is when they didnt have the records we had we had to tease these things out. There are also things we do not have manuscripts for. These are published transcriptions of documents. We dont have any. The one on the far left is lawsons account of some of the days in april in 1662 when he went to find out if his wife was murdered. That came out pretty quickly. There was a lot of information in that. The next one is a decree from 1692. Those things would be written out and officially published. The third one over is from 1700 when he is describing a lot of things and taking to task everybody that was involved. There are things there that we do not have any original manuscripts. When you hear that Rebecca Nurse was originally found not guilty, this is how we know. He has accounts and there from her and the jury foreman saying they were pressured to go back and bring her in guilty. And then the last one is a page from governor thomas hutchisons history in the 18th century. He had taken a lot of the original manuscripts home and he was writing a history of massachusetts. He has transcriptions of all sorts of documents that we do not have today. Two wordsstamp act 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. They trampled everything. A lot of these documents just disappeared. 1900s, therein the that had named poole 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. Margaret scott was executed. I bet very few of you even know who she is. You might have seen her bench, but there are only nine available to tell her case. And two of them are in the Essex County Court archives. That the Phillips Library holds. And two of them are in private collections. If you hear about an auction of one, those are the two indictments that pop up but , there are five more. Where are they . Four are at the Boston Public Library. It is after our book was published, we were trying to figure out if we could identify more of the handwriting in these documents. So we did archive hopping for , two weeks. We went to the Boston Public Library to go to the rare books and manuscripts room to see if they had any contemporaneous manuscripts we could maybe identify handwriting. We had been doing this in our book. At one point, we were looking up all of the towns. That might be helpful here at we opened up one of the drawers of the card catalog. Card catalog. [applause] ms. Burns ok. This was march, may 12, five march 2012, five years ago, card catalog. We were looking up raleigh. And we wondered what this meant. Four documents in the case of Margaret Scott. My heart skipped a beat. I thought, we only had it turns nine. Out that these are four of the five that we did not know where they were. We already knew the text, but because 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 mark on a manuscript. Sometimes, on the back, they would not copy that stuff but we did. We were looking at everything so we could try to figure out the date, and who wrote it. One of the big things is bernie about the records is that bernie was determined to set it up chronologically. The handwriting came as the second thing. Because when we were all transcribing, if you have a document with this much of somebodys handwriting 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 by somebody in in theirhandwriting handwriting to compare and resolve the ambiguity. We started sorting early on so we could keep track of whose handwriting was where. Anybody who spent time with the documents would be able to 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. But they couldnt find them. Remember, this was around the time that the Margaret Scott indictment had just gone up for auction and brought in about 30,000. They said, we will find it. We will let you know. 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. And so i pushed. , i was home sick for a couple of days and made some phone calls. And sure enough, i went up the chain. I know somebody who used to work there, i said, this is the right person . She said, yeah. 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. This was the Boston Public Library. It made the front page of the boston globe. It was worth . 5 million and they lost them. Went they had just mishelved them. And what it was, i thought, yes, i knew that would happen. It caused a lot of tumult at the Boston Public Library. Even have why do they these things. Shouldnt they know more about their collection hearing and i thought, card catalog. I double checked yesterday and it tu