In her featured review of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s 1974 book, Salem Possessed (“The Origins of Witchcraft Crisis 50 Years Later,” AHR, December 2024, 1751-1754), Carla Gardina Pestana laments that a work whose “assumptions underlying the interpretation have crumbled” should “still resonate” and remain “a seductive story” (p. 1754). Her conclusion would have been more persuasive had she summarized the scholarship undermining those assumptions and better captured why the book has nevertheless proved so popular.

On July 28, 2022, the state of Massachusetts formally exonerated the last innocent victim of the infamous seventeenth-century Salem witch hunt. Elizabeth Johnson Jr., known to her contemporaries as Betty, was a twenty-two-year-old resident of Andover, Massachusetts, when she got swept up in the frenzy of accusations, judicial examinations, jailings, trials, and executions that convulsed the communities of Essex County in 1692. All of the witch hunt’s other victims had already been exonerated by previous legislation.

In doing the research for my book, Switching Sides, I came across a surprising realization. Not only did Arthur Miller take nearly the whole story of the Salem witch hunt for his famous play, The Crucible (1953), from his having read Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), but he very likely drew the play’s central dramatic tension, concerning a former affair between the accuser, Abigail Williams, and the accused protagonist, John Procter, from Starkey’s history as well.

This article, a translation of the Introduction and Conclusion from my book, Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt, appeared in the French journal Perspectives Libres, No. 30 (juillet 2022 – juin 2023).