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SECONDARY SOURCES

The accusations, trials, convictions and executions for the crime of witchcraft also produced, for
decades, a vigorous supporting and critical literature.  However, the subject soon dropped out of
the historical memory of the United States during the later eighteenth century and the Early
National Period, much as did Puritanism itself.29
Signalled in the work of John Greenleaf Whittier and by the publication of Nathaniel
Hawthorne's Puritan stories--and his critical review of Whittier--, the topic was only revived
among historians in the 1860s: a renewed interest in colonial American history and in Puritanism
led to publication of substantial parts of the historical record.30 In 1864-5, W. Elliot  Woodward privately published
many of the original documents in two volumes entitled Records of Salem Witchcraft Copied
from the Original Documents.31 In 1866, the
Woodward Historical Series published as Volumes V-VII, Cotton Mather's
Wonders of the Invisible World and Robert Calef's More Wonders of
the Invisible World, with prefatory material by Samuel G. Drake (3 vols. reprt. New York,
1970). In 1869, Drake expanded his source publications to all of New England in Annals of
Witchcraft in New England and Elsewhere in the United States from Their First
Settlement.32
 
Published source materials engendered new histories, such as Charles Wentworth Upham's
Salem Witchcraft of 1867, a work that influenced George Bancroft's treatment of the
subject in his History of the United States of America. It also became a source of
inspiration for the later work of W. E. H. Lecky and others who regarded the Salem trials as part
of a formidable Puritan conspiracy and thus did much to shape modern lay--and some
scholarly--opinion. In the late nineteenth century, American scholars were much better served by
the assembling of text collections, libraries, and publication of the sources than by
interpretation--scholarly or otherwise. Such is the case in the library of Abner Cheney
Goodell, one of the most important nineteenth-century collectors, whose dispute with
George Moore over the legal aspects of the Salem trials is included here. George Lincoln Burr,
on the legal aspects of the trials, completed  admirably the work of Woodward and Drake. His
scholarly Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648-1706 of 1914 paid homage to Drake
and other scholars and offered the standard source-collection in print for the next two
generations. His work remained unparalleled until the publication of Paul Boyer and Stephen
Nissenbaum, Salem Village 
Witchcraft: A Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England, in 1972,
and their Salem Witchcraft papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the
Salem Witchcraft Outbreak, in 1977.33 In 1991,
David D. Hall published his Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A
Documentary History, 1638-1692, a source-collection that complemented the
Boyer-Nissenbaum Salem collections and broadened the documentary evidence across New
England.34
 
-notes-

29There is an interesting discussion in M. Wynn
Thomas, "Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World: Some Metamorphoses of
Salem Witchcraft," in Anglo, The Damned Art, 202-226, with references.

30On Hawthorne, see Thomas, 216-218, and on
Whittier, see John Greenleaf Whittier, The Supernaturalism of New England, Edward
Wagenknecht, ed. (Norman, Okla., 1969).

31Roxbury, Massachusetts. Reprinted New York,
1969.

32Vol. III in the Woodward Historical Series.  Rept.
New York, 1967, 1977.

331914; reprt. 1968, 1972.  Boyer and Nissenbaum,
Belmont, California,  1972; reprt. Boston, 1993.

34Boston, 1991.