Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt

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.

In Switching Sides, Tony 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 ut...