THE “NO STRINGS ATTACHED BOOK CLUB”
SPONSORED BY THE SOCIAL COMMITTEE OF THE PTOS

The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem
by Stacy Schiff
“The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.
Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent's life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched-at a politically tumultuous time-on the edge of what a visitor termed a "remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness."
The Witches is Schiff 's riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled-in crackling detail and lyrical prose-by one of our most acclaimed historians” (Amazon review)

November 8, 2016 (Tuesday)
4:30 PM-5:30 PM
REMSEN CONFERENCE ROOM 4D44
FOR INFORMATION CONTACT
LYNN BRISTOL: LYNN.BRISTOL@USPTO.GOV