Witches Of The Atlantic World

Breslaw (history, U. of Tennessee) has created a fascinating reader--for undergraduate classes in history, anthropology, religious studies, or women's studies--surveying the subject of witches, witch hunts, and the larger political context of both. The sections, which cover Christian perspectives, non-Christian beliefs, diabolical possession, issues of gender, and a lengthy section on the Salem witch trials, each include an introduction by Breslaw, primary sources, then secondary commentaries on the sources. The latter are excerpts from books and articles. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Breslaw (history, U. of Tennessee) has created a fascinating reader--for undergraduate classes in history, anthropology, religious studies, or women's studies--surveying the subject of witches, witch hunts, and the larger political context of both. The sections, which cover Christian perspectives, non-Christian beliefs, diabolical possession, issues of gender, and a lengthy section on the Salem witch trials, each include an introduction by Breslaw, primary sources, then secondary commentaries on the sources. The latter are excerpts from books and articles. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Witchcraft in Early North America investigates European, African, and Indian witchcraft beliefs and their expression in colonial America. Alison Games's engaging book takes us beyond the infamous outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, to look at how witchcraft was a central feature of colonial societies in North America. Her substantial and lively introduction orients readers to the subject and to the rich selection of documents that follows. The documents—some of which have never been published previously—include excerpts from trials in Virginia, New Mexico, and Massachusetts; accounts of outbreaks in Salem, Abiquiu (New Mexico), and among the Delaware Indians. This fascinating topic and the book's broad geographic and chronological coverage make this book ideally suited for readers interested in new approaches to colonial history and the history of witchcraft.

In Detestable and Wicked Arts, Paul B. Moyer places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. Moyer provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting. Focusing on witchcraft cases in New England between roughly 1640 and 1670, Detestable and Wicked Arts highlights ties between witch-hunting in the New and Old Worlds. Informed by studies on witchcraft in early modern Europe, Moyer presents a useful synthesis of scholarship on occult crime in New England and makes new and valuable contributions to the field.

Most scholarship on sorcery and witchcraft has narrowly focused on specific times and places, particularly early modern Europe and twentieth-century Africa. And much of that research interprets sorcery as merely a remnant of premodern traditions. Boldly challenging these views, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic takes a longer historical and broader geographical perspective, contending that sorcery is best understood as an Atlantic phenomenon that has significant connections to modernity and globalization. A distinguished group of contributors here examine sorcery in Brazil, Cuba, South Africa, Cameroon, and Angola. Their insightful essays reveal the way practices and accusations of witchcraft spread throughout the Atlantic world from the age of discovery up to the present, creating an indelible link between sorcery and the rise of global capitalism. Shedding new light on a topic of perennial interest, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic will be provocative, compelling reading for historians and anthropologists working in this growing field.

England's seventeenth-century colonial empire in North America and the Caribbean was created by migration. The quickening pace of this essential migration is captured in the London port register of 1635, the largest extant port register for any single year in the colonial period and unique in its record of migration to America and to the European continent. Alison Games analyzes the 7,500 people who traveled from London in that year, recreating individual careers, exploring colonial societies at a time of emerging viability, and delineating a world sustained and defined by migration. The colonial travelers were bound for the major regions of English settlement -- New England, the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and Bermuda -- and included ministers, governors, soldiers, planters, merchants, and members of some major colonial dynasties -- Winthrops, Saltonstalls, and Eliots. Many of these passengers were indentured servants. Games shows that however much they tried, the travelers from London were unable to recreate England in their overseas outposts. They dwelled in chaotic, precarious, and hybrid societies where New World exigencies overpowered the force of custom. Patterns of repeat and return migration cemented these inchoate colonial outposts into a larger Atlantic community. Together, the migrants' stories offer a new social history of the seventeenth century. For the origins and integration of the English Atlantic world, Games illustrates the primary importance of the first half of the seventeenth century.

An Archaeology of the British Atlantic World, 1600–1700 is the first book to apply the methods of modern-world archaeology to the study of the seventeenth-century English colonial world. Charles E. Orser, Jr explores a range of material evidence of daily life collected from archaeological excavations throughout the Atlantic region, including England, Ireland, western Africa, Native North America, and the eastern United States. He considers the archaeological record together with primary texts by contemporary writers. Giving particular attention to housing, fortifications, delftware, and stoneware, Orser offers new interpretations for each type of artefact. His study demonstrates how the archaeological record expands our understanding of the Atlantic world at a critical moment of its expansion, as well as to the development of the modern, Western world.