Throughout the spring 2012 semester, one group of George Mason University students searched for reason within a troubling time in 16th- and 17th-century European and American history.
These students were a part of HIST 300-008: Witch Hunting in Old/New England, a specialized historical methods course taught by Mack Holt, professor in the Department of History and Art History and an expert on early modern European history. The HIST 300-level course is required for all history majors to prepare for their advanced classes, but the topic varies with the instructor.
Holt used the course to ask a variety of questions about the Salem witch trials, a period of hysteria in 1692 that saw dozens of individuals imprisoned or executed for the crime of witchcraft.
“Historical research is not just about collecting information,” Holt explained. “It is about collecting information that solves a problem or answers a question that other people are interested in. How does a society that rarely executed anyone for the crime of witchcraft suddenly at one point in time develop a fear and paranoia of witches to the extent that they have to be incarcerated, prosecuted, and ultimately, executed?”
To answer these questions, and to learn how historians work, Holt had the students proceed backwards.
The course’s chief assignment was a deconstruction of an academic history, in which Holt encouraged the students to start their analysis of a particular article by reading the footnotes. The point of the assignment was to find out where and how a historian justifies and supports his or her statements, Holt said. Students would read a sophisticated paper and take it apart one footnote at a time, thus following the historian’s reasoning.
“History is a narrative that historians write about the past based on contemporary evidence,” Holt said. “We have to create it, not discover it, and every historian has to interpret the surviving evidence from the past.”
This approach allowed students to explore the witch trials in depth. Several differing accounts of these events circulate among today’s historians, Holt explained. Different historians have used different reasoning, with some choosing to focus on politics, others on religion, yet others on gender One prominent scholar even attributes the witch hysteria to the fear of Native American attacks.
“Are these solutions able to coexist with each other, or are some mutually exclusive?” Holt asked.
While Holt focused on historical narratives, he maintained that the past is connected to the present, and that history explains what that connection is and how it works.
“Today, why do certain social outcast groups get scapegoated?” Holt asked. “The term ‘witch hunt’ has now come to be applied to any social group that gets targeted or blamed for whatever problems exist in the world, in the same way that a group of Germans in the Nazi party blamed the Jews for the economic problems they experienced after World War I.”
Perhaps, using the approach taught in HIST 300, a group of future historians can speak on that subject with a bit more expertise and experience.