What Caused the Salem Witch Trials – What Was Really to Blame?

In my last post (read it with this link) I described the events of what happened in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Today, I’ll move on to what caused the Salem Witch Trials. Trials such as those in Salem are not common in American history. Perhaps the closest example from later American history would be in […]

The Salem Witch Trials – True Magic or True Madness?

With Halloween approaching, I feel it’s a good time for a discussion of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. It’s one of those events that seems rather anomalous in American history. Witch trials were relatively common in Europe starting in the later Middle Ages. To my knowledge, however, this is the only major example of them […]

The Core Values of Manifest Destiny

I’ve written a bit about Manifest Destiny in previous posts, but today I’d like to write about the core values of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a flexible concept, which helps account for its durability over time. This is a brief overview of the idea and the values driving it. The term first appeared in […]