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Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt Paperback – Illustrated, January 25, 2018

by Tony Fels (Author)

4.4 9 ratings

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Why have so many recent scholars of colonial witchcraft written sympathetically about the accusers while ignoring their victims?

For most historians living through the fascist and communist tyrannies that culminated in World War II and the Cold War, the Salem witch trials signified the threat to truth and individual integrity posed by mass ideological movements. Work on the trials produced in this era, including Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Marion L. Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, left little doubt that most intellectuals’ sympathies lay with the twenty innocent victims who stood up to Puritan intolerance by choosing to go to their deaths rather than confess to crimes they had never committed.

In Switching Sides, Tony Fels traces a remarkable shift in scholarly interpretations of the Salem witch hunt from the post–World War II era up through the present. Fels explains that for a new generation of historians influenced by the radicalism of the New Left in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Salem panic acquired a startlingly different meaning. Determined to champion the common people of colonial New England, dismissive toward liberal values, and no longer instinctively wary of utopian belief systems, the leading works on the subject to emerge from 1969 through the early 2000s highlighted economic changes, social tensions, racial conflicts, and political developments that served to unsettle the accusers in the witchcraft proceedings. These interpretations, still dominant in the academic world, encourage readers to sympathize with the perpetrators of the witch hunt, while at the same time showing indifference or even hostility toward the accused.

Switching Sides is meticulously documented, but its comparatively short text aims broadly at an educated American public, for whom the Salem witch hunt has long occupied an iconic place in the nation’s conscience. Readers will come away from the book with a sound knowledge of what is currently known about the Salem witch hunt―and pondering the relationship between works of history and the ideological influences on the historians who write them.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a book that is important in college, especially for young historians, because it helps us become better ones and shows us that ways of looking at things do change. Even people who are not historians will find this interesting, as it shows that history is a living, breathing, topic.
―Manhattan Book Review

There is much to learn from Fels' in-depth exploration . . . [Switching Sides] is an important work for anyone teaching historiography and/or Salem witchcraft . . . a useful tool in introducing students to how history is studied and written.
―Francis J. Bremer, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, Teaching History: A Journal of Methods

Fels knows the Salem witchcraft trials more deeply and expansively than anyone else ever has. With vivacious prose, palpable passion, and powerful reasoning, he delivers a book that is dramatic and dynamic. A rare work of critical historiography that could actually matter, Switching Sides is a brilliant and impassioned volume that will be a must-read for all students of early America.
―Michael W. Zuckerman, author of Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century

An important examination of the historiography of the Salem witch trials, this book demonstrates that we can assign blame, dismiss guilt, and reallocate innocence through the subtleties and nuances of language. Challenging a number of cherished interpretations that continue to define the subject's major arguments, this is a stunning, engaging, well-argued work. It will be difficult for any historian to discuss the events at Salem without introducing Switching Sides.
―Dane A. Morrison, coeditor of Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory

Switching Sides is a tour de force of scholarly interpretation, but it is also an eloquent challenge to the political assumptions of some of America’s most distinguished historians. With his erudite critique of the reigning wisdom about the Salem witch trials, Tony Fels reveals as much about our own time as about the malevolence that wracked New England at the end of the seventeenth century.
―Michael Kazin, author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation

Review

Switching Sides is a tour de force of scholarly interpretation, but it is also an eloquent challenge to the political assumptions of some of America’s most distinguished historians. With his erudite critique of the reigning wisdom about the Salem witch trials, Tony Fels reveals as much about our own time as about the malevolence that wracked New England at the end of the seventeenth century.

-- Michael Kazin

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press; Illustrated edition (January 25, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 280 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1421424371
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1421424378
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.68 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,093,094 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,454 in Historiography (Books)
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Robin M

Insightful take on the witch-hunt classics

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 8, 2021

Switching Sides is not a history book. Its purpose is to describe author biases and how these authors chose data to emphasize their storylines while justifying myriad causes of the accusers.

Fels interweaves many other witch-hunt books into his narrative, but centers on the themes of socioeconomic imbalances, village factionalism, social solidarity, deviant behavior, gender oppression, and racial politics as found in these four scholarly works:

* Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (1974)
* Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England by John Putnam Demos (1982)
* The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England by Carol F. Karlsen (1987)
* In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton (2002)

Switching Sides emphasizes that accused witches were innocent targets of injustice in an out-of-balance world. If we read all four books together, we understand multifaceted reasons behind the witch hunts—but skirt around what Fels believes are the underlying causes, of Puritanism and communal scapegoating. By reviewing these classic texts, Fels also incorporates newer research to update the Salem story. For example, his map of Salem Village is a major correction to Boyer and Nissenbaum.

Well worth reading, especially if you’re familiar with the books mentioned.

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Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt Paperback – Illustrated, January 25, 2018

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