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book of the Month
Elaine G. Breslau, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies (New York University Press, 1996).
When the accused Salem witch Sarah Good stood trial, she failed to discredit Tituba’s testimony against her. It was an unprecedented moment: the court . accepted an Arawak slave’s testimony against a white Puritan. In highlighting this rare event, Elaine Breslaw’s Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem affirms the central figure of her book as not only a victim, but a woman of agency.
Little is known of Tituba, in part because of the paucity of Puritan records. In a quest to reconstruct the enslaved woman’s life, Breslaw traveled to Barbados to consult colonial records as well as local historians and scholars. There, she uncovered a “Tattuba negro” listed in a plantation inventory, and from that record, traces later Barbadian references, providing a wealth of historical context to Tituba’s story. Breslaw acknowledges that her case is circumstantial. Yet, writing a historical book influenced by anthropology, geography, and cultural history, Breslaw provides access to a cultural context that might otherwise be lost to history.
Who was Tituba? Originally an Amerindian in Barbados, where Indigenous people were considered dangerous, she was raised among African slaves. With the African population numbers outpacing white, her classification as a “negro” may also have made her suspect. On the other hand, as Breslau argues, her creolized identity might have furthered her value as a servant, explaining her sale to the Rev. Samuel Parris.
Yet this complex identity made Tituba as vulnerable in Salem as in Barbados. Puritan Mary Sibley, involved in the witch cake incident with Tituba, received a mild punishment; Parris gained deniability. Tituba, by contrast, was later accused of witchcraft and imprisoned.
Recovering the lives of the marginalized is inherently difficult, and Breslaw’s unconventional approach must be read with that in mind. At times she risks overstating causation where evidence is thin.
Nonetheless, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem is a compelling and innovative attempt to recover the life of a woman nearly lost to myth. Breslaw contributes significantly to our understanding Tituba and her fate. Even if they question her conclusions, readers will find much of value.
Evana Rose Tamayo, October 2025
Book of the Month
Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World (London: Allen Lane, 2021).
In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, rumours began to spread. After a spate of mysterious illnesses, children perishing overnight, crops failing – something, someone had to be found responsible. First a wife, Mary Parsons, accused her husband Hugh Parsons of witchcraft. Then neighbours, already disliking the belligerent brick maker, pointed the finger. Both husband and wife were charged with witchcraft. Mary died in prison; Hugh survived his trial.
Malcolm Gaskill’s captivating tale of the disintegration of a marriage and the descent of a community into fear, envy, and darkness is both quotidian and heartbreaking. In his beautifully crafted recreation of 1651 Springfield, there is no accusation too petty, no fear that was not magnified, no resentment that could not bloom into malevolence. It is wrenching to read the small but steady steps taken towards tragedy by a community always aware of demonic forces and hearing of witches far and near. The Ruin of All Witches is a compelling, important introduction to claustrophobic, spiteful world of accuser and accused in New England witchcraft.
What makes this book stand out, however, is not just this intimate portrait. He rejects the longstanding idea of witchcraft as a form of hysteria in favor of a more rigorous analysis. “[W]itchcraft was not some wild superstition,” he writes, “but a serious expression of disorder embedded in politics, religion and law.” In Springfield, the larger forces of political and theological disorder pressed down on mental illness, envy, hunger and scarcity, with tragic results.
Sarah Stewart, August 2025
Read more
There’s a vast literature of exciting work on early New England. The lists we’ve compiled only begin to scratch the surface. For fear of overwhelming readers, we’ve listed just some of our favourites – there are many more on our overflowing bookshelves.
If you’ve got a book to recommend, let us know! Email phbostons@gmail.com.
General
Bailyn, Bernard. The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Bremer, Francis J. One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Grandjean, Katherine. American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Hall, David D. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Silverman, David J. This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Everyday life
Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Deetz, James and Patricia Scott Deetz. The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth County. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Puritanism
Bremer, Francis J. First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.
Bremer, Francis J. Puritanism: A Very Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Bremer, Francis J. John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Cooper, James F. Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hall, David D. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. New York, Knopf, 2011.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. New York: Pearson, 2007.
Rogers, Daniel. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Rogers-Stokes, Lori. Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard's Church in Cambridge, 1638-1649: Heroic Souls. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Women
LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650 – 1750. New York: Vintage, 1980/1991.
black new england
Greene, Lorenzo, The Negro in Colonial New England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942.
Handouts for Recovering Black History: A Workshop, presented by Michelle Stahl, Monadnock Center for History and Culture, and Jennifer Carroll, Historical Society of Cheshire County, April 17, 2024, for local historians identifying the Black community in early New England:
Town History Research and Search Terms
witchcraft
Baker, Emerson W. A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Baker, Emerson W. The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
Behringer, Wolfgang. Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History. Wiley, 2004.
Gagnon, Daniel A. A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2023.
Gaskill, Malcolm. The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.
Gaskill, Malcolm. Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Hite, Richard. In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692. Westholme, 2018.
Moyer, Paul B. Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Cornell University Press, 2020.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Elizabeth Reis. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. Cornell University Press, 1997.
Roach, Marilynne. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day by Day Chronology of a Community under Siege. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002.
Roach, Marilynne. Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2013.
Rosenthal, Bernard et al, eds. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Ross III, Richard S. Before Salem: Witch Hunting in the Connecticut River Valley, 1647-1663. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2017.
WEBSITES
Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project https://salem.lib.virginia.edu
17th Century New England, with Special Emphasis on the Essex County Witch Hunt of 1692 http://www.17thc.us/
Cornell University Witchcraft Collection https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/witchcraftcoll/
Salem’s Trials: Lessons and Legacies of 1692. A Symposium held at Salem State University on June 10, 2017, to commemorate the 325th anniversary of the witch trials. Available at: https://www.c-span.org/organization/salem-state-university/45222/
WATCH AND LISTEN
"The Salem Witch Trials: Interpreting History and Finding Relevance" a presentation by Dan Lipcan and Paula Richter, curators at the Peabody Essex Museum, for PHB. Watch it here.
Unobscured with Aaron Mahnke, Season One: The Salem Witch Trials https://www.grimandmild.com/unobscured
The Thing About Witch Hunts witchhuntshow.com
The Thing About Salem aboutsalem.com
Slavery
Secondary sources
Allibhai, Aabid, “Race & Slavery at the First Church in Roxbury: The Colonial Period, 1631-1775,” Unitarian Universalist Church, February 3, 2023.
Boles, Richard, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
DasSarma, Anjali, and Linford D. Fisher, “The Persistence of Indigenous Unfreedom in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, 1704-1804,” Slavery & Abolition, March 30, 2023, 1-25.
Fisher, Linford D., “‘Why Shall Wee Have Peace to Bee Made Slaves’: Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory 64, no.1 (January 1, 2027), 91-114.
Gonzalez, Eduardo, “Of One Blood? Cotton Mather’s Christian Slavery”, historicbostons.org
Hardesty, Jared Ross, Black Lives, Native Lives, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.
Hardesty, Jared Ross, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston. New York: New York University, 2016.
Harvard University, “Responsibility and Repair: Legacies of Indigenous Enslavement, Indenture, and Colonization at Harvard and Beyond,” conference, November 2 and 3, 2023.
Harvard University, “Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2022.
Manegold, C.S. Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Maskiell, Nicole Safford, “‘Here Lyes the Body of Cicely Negro’: Enslaved Women in Colonial Cambridge and the Making of New England History,” New England Quarterly, vol. XCV, no. 2, June 2022.
Newell, Margaret Ellen, “Our Hidden History: Roger Williams and Slavery’s Origins,” Providence Journal and Bulletin, August 29, 2020.
Newell, Margaret Ellen, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670-1720,” in Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, eds., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003, 106-136.
Newell, Margaret Ellen, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Sesay Jr., Chernoh M., “The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery’s Abolition in Massachusetts,” in New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVII, no. 1, March 2014.
Tucker, Wayne, Eleven Names Project: Recovering Enslaved People of Massachusetts, substack
Warren, Wendy. New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. New York: Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2018.
Primary sources
Jonathan Edwards’s church records from Northampton, Mass., Congregational Library & Archives.
“Flora's confession and testimony, 1749 July 23” from the Second Church of Ipswich, Mass., Congregational Library & Archives.
Mather, Cotton, A Good Master Well Served. A Brief Discourse on the Necessary Properties & Practices of a Good Servant in Every-Kind of Servitude. Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1696.
Mather, Cotton, The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, The Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity. Boston: B. Green, 1706.
Mather, Cotton, “Rules for the Society of Negroes,” broadsheet, 1693.
Sewell, Samuel, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial. Boston: printed by Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700.
Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas.
Native people of the Eastern Woodlands
William Apess. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Bragdon, Kathleen J. Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
——————————-. Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.
Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Calloway, Colin G. After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 1997.
DeLucia, Christine M. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Lopenzina, Drew, Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017.
Lopenzina, Drew, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.
Mandell, Daniel R. Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
National Park Service, “Native Americans and the Boston Harbor Islands.”
O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Soliz, Chester P. The Historical Footprints of the Mashpee Wampanoag: Appeal to the Great Spirit. Sarasota, Florida: Bardolf & Company, 2001.
Strobel, Christoph. Native Americans of New England. Praeger, 2020.
Waabu O’Brien, Frank, Understanding Indian Place Names in Southern New England. Boulder: Bauu Press, 2010.
Warren, James. God, War and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England. New York: Scribner Publishing, 2018.
Williams, Roger. A Key Into the Language of America, ed. Dawn Dove, Sandra Robinson, Loren Spears, Dorothy Herman Papp, Kathleen Bragdon. The Tomaquag Museum Edition. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2019.
The tribes of the Eastern Woodlands also provide important histories of their people, including museums. This is not a complete list.
Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
Mashantucket (Western) Pequot Tribal Nation
Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag
Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe at Nulhegan-Memhremagog
Wampanoag Tribe of Chappaquidick
Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah)
