Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. We are giving
Speaker 1: you a classic episode, a conversation we had with a
Speaker 1: longtime friend of the show, Aaron Manke, the creator of
Speaker 1: Lore and Matt. You worked pretty closely with Aard in
Speaker 1: the past, and I think we both really enjoyed this
Speaker 1: exploration with it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. There are four seasons of the podcast Unobscured.
Speaker 2: I am. I think I'm credited as EP on all
Speaker 2: of those, but this first season, this conversation, we're talking
Speaker 2: about the Salem witch Trials. For another friend of the show,
Speaker 2: Alex Williams, and I traveled out to Boston and the
Speaker 2: area out there, you know, Salem and the places that
Speaker 2: were actually Salem, the towns that were actually Salem, and
Speaker 2: we went to libraries and saw original documents, and Aaron
Speaker 2: put all of this together in a show called Unobscured.
Speaker 2: That is just it's really great. It's the most full
Speaker 2: picture of the Salem Witch Trials that I had ever
Speaker 2: imagined in my head when I listened to that show
Speaker 2: and helped make it, and thankfully we got to speak
Speaker 2: with Aaron about it for quite a while.
Speaker 3: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
Speaker 3: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 3: learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1: Our compatriot Nole is off on adventures in the meantime.
Speaker 1: They call me Ben when you're joined with our super
Speaker 1: producer Paul Mission control deck, and most importantly, you are
Speaker 1: here and that makes this stuff they don't want you
Speaker 1: to know. Today we are exploring one of the strangest,
Speaker 1: most infamous series of events in early American history genuine
Speaker 1: real life which trials, and nowadays most people only know
Speaker 1: of these events through wildly fanciful works of fiction, film, books, etc.
Speaker 1: So how do we separate the fact from the fancy here?
Speaker 1: How do we establish what really led to these trials,
Speaker 1: what genuinely happened to the victims, and how these events
Speaker 1: impacted our culture and history from that point onto the
Speaker 1: modern day. This is admittedly a tall order, Matt, and luckily,
Speaker 1: very luckily, we are not tackling it alone. We are
Speaker 1: joined by the creator, producer, and host of the hit
Speaker 1: podcast Lore, which has also been adapted into a book
Speaker 1: series and a television series, and as well as the
Speaker 1: creator of the brand new podcast, Unobscured, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Speaker 1: Aaron Manky, Hey, gentlemen, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Hey, is our pleasure to have you on this show. Erin,
Speaker 2: And just a bit of full disclosure here, I work
Speaker 2: with Aaron in creating the show Unobscured. Just lest you
Speaker 2: think we're a fast one on you, We work together
Speaker 2: on this, but the bulk of the work is most
Speaker 2: certainly Aaron's. But we had it was just a fascinating
Speaker 2: deep dive into the Salem Witch Trials, right, and Aaron
Speaker 2: Ben hit on it immediately at the top of this show.
Speaker 2: But it's something I want to jump right into. Just
Speaker 2: this fact that many of us are introduced to the
Speaker 2: Salem Witch Trials usually in at least in my case,
Speaker 2: an academic setting. You take an early history class about
Speaker 2: American history, then you know you kind of have an understanding.
Speaker 2: But then all of that gets shaped by all of
Speaker 2: this pop culture and all of these other references. So
Speaker 2: how has our understanding of the real Witch Trials been
Speaker 2: modified by this pop culture?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I think you're exactly right. You know,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of different factors that come into play
Speaker 4: to I guess hide the true story, and not always intentionally.
Speaker 4: It's not like there's a dare I say it on
Speaker 4: the show, But it's not like there's a conspiracy to
Speaker 4: hide the the you know, the true acts and deeds
Speaker 4: and all that went on. You know, the sale and
Speaker 4: witch trials was a a you know, roughly thirteen or
Speaker 4: fourteen month period of time that had a lot going on,
Speaker 4: and so you think about maybe bumping into it in
Speaker 4: a high school class on early American history, and you know,
Speaker 4: it's one of, you know, a couple a dozen things
Speaker 4: that you're going to talk about that semester, and so
Speaker 4: by necessity you sort of have to brush over it
Speaker 4: and just mentioned a few things, like it happened sixteen
Speaker 4: ninety two. Nineteen people were hanged, one was crushed to
Speaker 4: death by stones, and five died in jail. And that's
Speaker 4: that's the story you hear, you know, and maybe somebody
Speaker 4: throws in, well, you know, they believe that there were
Speaker 4: witches and the church one of those dead, and you know,
Speaker 4: we just we sort of sum it all up into
Speaker 4: a couple of sentences. And especially in this day and
Speaker 4: age of you know, small character count tweets and social
Speaker 4: media posts, it's easy to try to summarize things up
Speaker 4: like that. The other factory coming into this. So, like
Speaker 4: you mentioned before, is pop culture, right, like films and
Speaker 4: screens like like The Crucible and TV shows and even
Speaker 4: you know, bad one hour documentaries. You can cover something
Speaker 4: like Sale and Wich trials in one hour. So you
Speaker 4: know that those things all just sort of work to
Speaker 4: force us toward an easy sound bite answer, and when
Speaker 4: you do that, you lose all of the nuance.
Speaker 2: You know, something that a lot of people may not know.
Speaker 2: It's something that I learned fairly recently. You actually physically
Speaker 2: lived within a very close proximity to where the Salewich
Speaker 2: trials occurred.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, can you tell us about that? Well, you know,
Speaker 4: so you hear about the Sale and Witch trials, and
Speaker 4: if you were to find the location where a lot
Speaker 4: of the victims came from on a map today, it
Speaker 4: would come with the name Danvers as the town and
Speaker 4: not Salem, which is sort of confusing, right You kind
Speaker 4: of expect it to be Salem Salem, which is a
Speaker 4: little bit more toward the east. But back in the
Speaker 4: late sixteen hundreds, Salem was like this territory, you know,
Speaker 4: and you have the city, but then you have the
Speaker 4: bread basket around it of all these different communities, places
Speaker 4: that exist now today as their own independent communities like
Speaker 4: Wenham and Danvers and Beverly and Andover and Topsfield and
Speaker 4: all these places slowly were chiseled off of the Salem
Speaker 4: land mass and became their own things. So what is
Speaker 4: now today Danvers used to be Salem Village and Salem
Speaker 4: proper today used to be Salem Town because that was
Speaker 4: sort of the built up, wealthier town aspect of it all.
Speaker 1: Ah See, this is going to be new information for
Speaker 1: quite a few of our listeners here, you know, and
Speaker 1: it's important, I would argue for us to carve these
Speaker 1: distinctions out and clarify them because the last time that
Speaker 1: we were in Boston we learned firsthand from some residents
Speaker 1: about Salem's the current Salem's pretty successful tourism industry based
Speaker 1: off of this tragedy. Is that a real thing? Is
Speaker 1: it still in full swing?
Speaker 4: Oh? Yeah? Yeah? And you know, and we talk about
Speaker 4: Danvers being old Salem Village and Salem being old Salem
Speaker 4: Town and that dichotomy between the two places. There's there's
Speaker 4: a reason why their name is changed, and that's partly
Speaker 4: to distance themselves from what happened most of the Salem
Speaker 4: based because Okay, so there were a lot of victims
Speaker 4: that came from other communities and over Topsfield, all over
Speaker 4: the place, Gloucester, but a lot of the Salem victims
Speaker 4: came from the Salem village area. So what is now
Speaker 4: Danvers And a lot of the the legal aspects, especially
Speaker 4: the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which was sort of
Speaker 4: the the higher level jury plus judges system, and then
Speaker 4: moving on to the Superior court, those things all happen
Speaker 4: in Salem town. So you had victims coming from one
Speaker 4: area and that's now Danvers, and that's wildly generalized. I'm
Speaker 4: just roughly saying it. And then in Salem, basically all
Speaker 4: the bad guys, right, all the people that sat in
Speaker 4: the jury or on the court and judge people and
Speaker 4: sentenced them to death. So you have these two towns,
Speaker 4: you know, three hundred and twenty five years ago, we're
Speaker 4: sort of sitting next to each other, and they've grown,
Speaker 4: they've grown up, but they've also grown apart culturally, and
Speaker 4: so Danver's changed its name and it sort of distances
Speaker 4: itself from the idea that the witch trials happened there
Speaker 4: like you can find things. Rebecca Nurse is one of
Speaker 4: the victims. She was a seventy five seventy six year
Speaker 4: old woman who her crime was that she was too
Speaker 4: generous with one of her neighbors. Back then, Puritans were
Speaker 4: incredibly prejudiced against any other faiths, and so even Quakers,
Speaker 4: which we never think of Quakers as being like antagonists
Speaker 4: or bad people, but in the Puritan mind, they just
Speaker 4: they weren't Puritans, and so Quakers were bad. And she
Speaker 4: took in a Quaker orphan and that sort of sealed
Speaker 4: her fate. Among other things. She had some rumors spread
Speaker 4: about her and whatnot. Anyway, her house is still there.
Speaker 4: It's a homestead, it's a museum. You can tour. Three
Speaker 4: hundred and twenty five years later, it's still there, and
Speaker 4: it's set up more sensitively and as a as a
Speaker 4: museum as opposed to the Salem Witch Museum, which is
Speaker 4: you know, red lights and dark shadows and witches and
Speaker 4: cauldrons and things like that. And and so there's this
Speaker 4: there's this dichotomy of Salem sort of dodging the issue
Speaker 4: and Danvers dodging the issue, and Salem Town sort of
Speaker 4: rolling right into it. I mean, there's a there's a
Speaker 4: statue of Samantha from the the old TV show Bewitched
Speaker 4: in the middle of town because she was a witch,
Speaker 4: and let's put a statue out for her. You know,
Speaker 4: Oh wow, makes sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all right, Well you've hit on something very
Speaker 2: important here, and that's that dichotomy between these two towns.
Speaker 2: But there's also a dichotomy between what our understanding of
Speaker 2: what a witch is now. That is again, have it's
Speaker 2: been morphed and changed over all of these years? What
Speaker 2: was a which in sixteen ninety two New England.
Speaker 4: It's such a tricky question. Which was I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: in the religious sense. To the Puritans, it was somebody
Speaker 4: who was working for the devil to tear down the
Speaker 4: Puritan mission of this utopian society in the New World.
Speaker 4: The reason why the Puritans came over is because the
Speaker 4: Anglican Church, which was kind of a Protestant branch off
Speaker 4: of the Catholic Church, the Church of England, that just
Speaker 4: wasn't pure enough. It hadn't tossed off enough of the
Speaker 4: Catholic trappings to be acceptable, and the Puritans wanted it
Speaker 4: to be more pure. Thus the name and among all
Speaker 4: of the colonies that were set up in the sixteen
Speaker 4: hundreds that were all sort of like either endeavors of
Speaker 4: the crown or business ventures. This was a business venture
Speaker 4: that was run purely by the Puritans, and they all
Speaker 4: the people that ran it essentially came over with it
Speaker 4: and set up shop here. So it wasn't being run
Speaker 4: from afar by the owners. It was being run here.
Speaker 4: They had a charter from the king and you had
Speaker 4: to get that. But they were they were this isolated
Speaker 4: religious community, and anybody who threatened their mission was potentially
Speaker 4: a witch. They were an agent of the devil. And
Speaker 4: there were all these cool little trappings that came with
Speaker 4: it that we still have pieces of in our culture today.
Speaker 4: You know, you think about how many times you've seen
Speaker 4: a witch on TV with a black cat, right, like
Speaker 4: that's just the it's the partner in crime they always have.
Speaker 4: And that comes back to the idea of a familiar,
Speaker 4: you know, an animal that is a evil spirit in
Speaker 4: the form of an animal that follows the witch around,
Speaker 4: and that's just almost a European and American constant that
Speaker 4: you have familiars. There are things like, well, we can
Speaker 4: tell you're a witch if you have witch marks on you,
Speaker 4: which is supposed to be like this little devil's teat
Speaker 4: this this place where the demons will will suckle from
Speaker 4: the witch and they look like freckles or moles or
Speaker 4: skin tags, and of course they found them on people
Speaker 4: because everybody has those things. So you know, it was
Speaker 4: this really tricky thing where, yeah, they were enemies of
Speaker 4: the Puritan faith, but after that it was just kind
Speaker 4: of hard to nail it down, which created problems for them.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, we can I can totally understand this
Speaker 1: because in the case of I believe it was Sarah Osborne, right,
Speaker 1: one of the first people accused of witchcraft.
Speaker 4: In her case, I.
Speaker 1: Think one of the primary causes for persecution or prosecution
Speaker 1: was that she was suspected of living with her second
Speaker 1: husband before they got officially married.
Speaker 4: And there was a little bit of that going on. Yeah,
Speaker 4: she had a child with him, She had a child
Speaker 4: from a previous marriage, she had a child with I
Speaker 4: think before she married her second husband. And I'm not
Speaker 4: sure if I'm getting my people right or not. Bish
Speaker 4: I think she might have been the one who, like
Speaker 4: one of the kids lived at home and one of
Speaker 4: them lived in sort of a boarding house situation. But yeah,
Speaker 4: Sarah Osburne wasn't she. I mean, she was also just outsider.
Speaker 4: She wasn't respected, She didn't tow the line, she didn't
Speaker 4: follow the rules, and people then as people now lash
Speaker 4: out against the outsider, they become a scapegoat for our
Speaker 4: fears and our anxieties.
Speaker 2: And there's something here to be said. I'm trying to
Speaker 2: articulate this correctly Erin, but the thin, somewhat non existent
Speaker 2: line between religion and the law within the land and
Speaker 2: it's almost the same thing in most respects. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: trying to wrap my head around exactly what I'm trying
Speaker 2: to ask you here, But I feel like that is
Speaker 2: one of the major contributing factors, or at least that's
Speaker 2: one of the things you think about nowadays when you're
Speaker 2: imagining this time period. How did that come into play
Speaker 2: with setting up these trials? Like were the Oyer and
Speaker 2: Terminer trials specifically a law of the land kind of
Speaker 2: thing or was it a religious law thing?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, that's a forty five minute podcast in
Speaker 4: that answer right there, But like, let's just let's say
Speaker 4: it this way. So they had a charter which was
Speaker 4: sort of a permission certificate from the king to go
Speaker 4: create this colony. The charter usually had some laws and
Speaker 4: regulations that were in there, and for the most part
Speaker 4: you were supposed to adhere to English law, kind of
Speaker 4: defer to that. But because of the way the Puritan
Speaker 4: colony of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was set up, it
Speaker 4: was just a little different. They had a little bit
Speaker 4: more freedom and latitude, and they were able to build
Speaker 4: their faith into the laws a lot more tightly. So
Speaker 4: when the Salem witch trials happened, it happens in this
Speaker 4: you know, doctor Emerson Baker's one of our historians, and
Speaker 4: he calls his book the Storm of Witchcraft because it's
Speaker 4: this perfect storm of ingredients. Among all these other things,
Speaker 4: the fear of the wars with the Native Americans to
Speaker 4: the north, the French who were allied with them, a
Speaker 4: harsh winter, all these different factors coming together. You also
Speaker 4: had the fact that the King kind of in a
Speaker 4: power play, takes the charter away from people shortly before
Speaker 4: the witch trials happened. So they're essentially government lists. They
Speaker 4: don't have any they don't have anything, and there's this
Speaker 4: promise of a new charter, but they haven't got it yet.
Speaker 4: So they're literally there society that has lost all their laws,
Speaker 4: and so they're leaning on the people like John Hawthorne,
Speaker 4: who you know him and his father both worked with
Speaker 4: the Charter and they knew the law. They're kind of
Speaker 4: leaning on these people to help them. But you know,
Speaker 4: their faith is permeating these things. They you know, they
Speaker 4: have this fear of witches. And I mean even when
Speaker 4: they sit down with a new charter and start to
Speaker 4: list out, like, all right, we have to put together
Speaker 4: a list of capital crimes, which they started doing in
Speaker 4: sixteen ninety two. You know, witchcraft falls on the capital
Speaker 4: crime list. You're not going to find that on the
Speaker 4: books today because we have a very secular government, but
Speaker 4: back then that border between church and state was a
Speaker 4: lot more fuzzy, and so things like you know, being
Speaker 4: a witch became this capital offense and it was executed,
Speaker 4: executable by death with some exceptions. The deeper into the
Speaker 4: trials you get and it just gets more complex. Things
Speaker 4: like you know, at some point, if you used witchcraft
Speaker 4: but you didn't kill anybody, you could be punished, but
Speaker 4: you won't be executed and whatnot. But yeah, the faith
Speaker 4: really did it permeated everything, really.
Speaker 1: And it makes sense what you're saying given the context
Speaker 1: of the time when people are I think you hit
Speaker 1: a really powerful point here when you say that the
Speaker 1: people found themselves governless right in a hostile environment in
Speaker 1: terms of the ecosystem they were surrounded by, and if
Speaker 1: we're being honest, this is in many ways a group
Speaker 1: of what we would call religious extremists today. So people
Speaker 1: in a vacuum of organizational structure would tend to fall
Speaker 1: back on the number one organizational structure that they considered
Speaker 1: their core set of values, which personally, and I don't
Speaker 1: want to inject too much of my opinion here, is
Speaker 1: terrifying because it kind of it sounds as if this
Speaker 1: is something that occurs, you know, in the distant past.
Speaker 1: But it's very important for us to remember that people
Speaker 1: are still people. We're still the same cognitive machines. And yeah,
Speaker 1: these sorts of things are not as implausible in the
Speaker 1: modern day as they were. You know, they're not any
Speaker 1: less plausible, I should say, than they were in the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, I mean one of the benefits of I mean,
Speaker 4: think about how our government, you know, the original American
Speaker 4: government was put together. You had representatives who were you know,
Speaker 4: chosen by the people to go to a continental congress
Speaker 4: and they lay down laws and they work together. They
Speaker 4: worked with a lot of existing laws around Europe that
Speaker 4: they knew of, you know, the magnet Carta was an
Speaker 4: influence and things like that. But they were they were
Speaker 4: a voice for the people as a collective putting things together,
Speaker 4: and that made it a lot a lot more infallible.
Speaker 4: You had people saying, well, that idea sounds good, but
Speaker 4: here are three problems with it, and that's this is
Speaker 4: how it could go wrong, and so they could adjust things.
Speaker 4: When you move to a society that's smaller, I mean,
Speaker 4: Salem Village had about five hundred people in it, five
Speaker 4: five fifty. Salem Town I think had maybe two thousand
Speaker 4: people in it. Now that's a smaller group of people,
Speaker 4: with a smaller pool of leaders making up laws and
Speaker 4: trying to find their way. They're going to make a
Speaker 4: lot more mistakes, and they're going to bring a lot
Speaker 4: more personal bias into things, which is why, I mean,
Speaker 4: this is why dictatorships go wrong, and why emperors and
Speaker 4: kings have so many problems unless they have some sort
Speaker 4: of a parliamentary system around them to keep them in check,
Speaker 4: because one person making choices is going to make a
Speaker 4: lot more worse choices than that a group of people
Speaker 4: collectively thinking being through with common sense. So this is,
Speaker 4: you know, this is partly what plays out in Salem.
Speaker 4: You have a bunch of people who they're just kind
Speaker 4: of leaning on what they know and their personal opinions
Speaker 4: and their fears and their hopes and all this stuff,
Speaker 4: and we get a mess and will pause right there
Speaker 4: for a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back.
Speaker 4: This is a little bit biographical, But what were your
Speaker 4: primary inspirations or motivations that set you on the path
Speaker 4: to explore and clarify this story? You know, I mean
Speaker 4: I've made the podcast called Lore for about three and
Speaker 4: a half years now, and Law is essentially a dark
Speaker 4: historical podcast. You know, I look for stories from history
Speaker 4: that have a more unusual or or dark is just
Speaker 4: the best word for it, a dark bent that you know,
Speaker 4: that's the kind of stuff you're not going to learn
Speaker 4: about in history class. You're not going to learn about
Speaker 4: the drummer of Tedworth. You know, a house haunted by
Speaker 4: a ghost that keeps making a drumming sound and possibly
Speaker 4: a haunted drum and all these You're not going to
Speaker 4: learn about these things in history class and and and
Speaker 4: that's why I I do lore because I want people
Speaker 4: to hear these great tales of things that happened and
Speaker 4: people claim that they were true, and I want to
Speaker 4: explore them. Most of the time, I'm fine finding topics
Speaker 4: that I can do in a half an hour. That's
Speaker 4: typically the format of the show, you know, about thirty
Speaker 4: minutes long, throwing some ads and some credits and more good.
Speaker 4: And that leaves out a few topics, you know. And
Speaker 4: so from the very beginning, I thought, well, the Salem
Speaker 4: witch Trials fits. You know that it has all of
Speaker 4: these really great details. There's good context lessons in here,
Speaker 4: like learning about how witchcraft worked in Europe and England,
Speaker 4: all these great things, but you couldn't cover it in
Speaker 4: an hour or a half an hour. Even so I
Speaker 4: just kind of set it aside. And so for a
Speaker 4: couple of years I had a folder on my hard
Speaker 4: drive that said it said lower the Salem Project. And
Speaker 4: I had this vision of maybe someday when I had
Speaker 4: free time, ha ha ha. Because I just got busier
Speaker 4: and busier as time went by, maybe someday I'll be
Speaker 4: able to do like a little mini series on Salem.
Speaker 4: And I didn't know if i'd give its own RSS
Speaker 4: feed or if I would, you know, maybe make it
Speaker 4: a paid only like you could go, you know, download
Speaker 4: the thing, like an audiobook sort of thing, because I
Speaker 4: didn't know what the material would would turn into. So
Speaker 4: it wasn't until you know, about a year ago that
Speaker 4: I started working with some of your folks over there
Speaker 4: at host Stuff Works and realized that if we were
Speaker 4: going to build a network of shows, one of those
Speaker 4: could very well be a long form documentary series that
Speaker 4: just takes time, you know, it gives these really big
Speaker 4: stories the breathing room that they need and let it
Speaker 4: go deep. And so that's that was the perfect home
Speaker 4: for the Salem topic. And not only that, but living
Speaker 4: in it and around it here in my area, it
Speaker 4: just made sense. And it's you can't pass up a
Speaker 4: topic like this.
Speaker 2: So jumping back, let's jump back to sixteen ninety two Salem.
Speaker 2: It's winter time. It's a freaking cold out there, and
Speaker 2: there's no central heating, there's no electricity. The only way
Speaker 2: to keep you and your family warm enough to not
Speaker 2: die is to have firewood. And one thing that I
Speaker 2: didn't understand going into this project was just how vital
Speaker 2: firewood was as a commodity, as almost a currency in
Speaker 2: a way. Can you talk to us about the importance
Speaker 2: of firewood back then?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, picture that post apocalyptic movie that you love,
Speaker 4: where you know there is no more US currency, the
Speaker 4: global market's gone, and you need to go buy food
Speaker 4: from some trader and it's either a precious metal or
Speaker 4: it's a bullet. You know, things like that that you're
Speaker 4: trying to find ways, like what are valuable commodities to
Speaker 4: trade for something, and firewood was certainly I wouldn't say
Speaker 4: it was worth its weight in gold, but it was
Speaker 4: highly important. So to illustrate this, you know, the minister
Speaker 4: in Salem village, where a lot of the victims came from,
Speaker 4: was this guy named Samuel Parris who came from I mean,
Speaker 4: his family was English. Obviously, his uncle had purchased or
Speaker 4: somehow acquired a plantation on the island of Barbados, and
Speaker 4: then he was really bad at running the business, and
Speaker 4: so he brought his brother in, which was Samuel's dad,
Speaker 4: and his brother saved it. You know, his uncle eventually
Speaker 4: dies and so Sam's dad inherits the place and runs
Speaker 4: it well, but some natural disasters happened. There's like this
Speaker 4: massive hurricane and there's a drought, and I think some
Speaker 4: sickness and smallpox maybe, And eventually Samuel Parris has found
Speaker 4: himself running the place and he doesn't want to anymore.
Speaker 4: He realizes it's going to kill him, so he sells
Speaker 4: it and heads north. He wanted to go to Harvard,
Speaker 4: and while his dad was still alive, he was attending Harvard,
Speaker 4: which is really really old school from the sixteen hundreds
Speaker 4: outside of Boston. And so when he finally sold the
Speaker 4: place off for good, he moved back to Boston, maybe
Speaker 4: thinking that he would finish school because he had stopped
Speaker 4: a few classes, shy, maybe just looking for work some
Speaker 4: of his money to set up a business there. Finally,
Speaker 4: he ends up not doing well at business and taking
Speaker 4: the position in Salem Village as their new minister. The
Speaker 4: negotiation process for his contract took him over a year
Speaker 4: because he was this super litigious, like we have to
Speaker 4: get all the tea's crossed and the ice dotted, and
Speaker 4: want to be taken care of. I think he had
Speaker 4: some high aspirations, but one of the things that he
Speaker 4: was super picky about was firewood that he needed his
Speaker 4: firewood delivered. And even after becoming the minister there, it
Speaker 4: was a problem constantly with you know, farmers in the area.
Speaker 4: It was like their turn that week to bring him
Speaker 4: a load of firewood, and they just they wouldn't do it.
Speaker 4: He was hard to like, it was hard to get
Speaker 4: along with, and some of them just sort of held
Speaker 4: it back as a leverage over him. And there's these
Speaker 4: stories of him writing in his study upstairs in the
Speaker 4: middle of winter, dipping his quill in the inkwell to
Speaker 4: scratch on the book, and the ink in the inkwell
Speaker 4: being frozen because it's so cold in the house, and
Speaker 4: wood just becomes this thorn in his side for the
Speaker 4: entire time.
Speaker 2: Just chop your own firewood, man.
Speaker 4: You know, as a minister, you're giving the parsonage to
Speaker 4: live in. There's no land with it. All the land
Speaker 4: of Budding you is fenced off and it belongs to
Speaker 4: somebody else, and they're going to cut down their trees
Speaker 4: and use it. And he was sort of stuck. But yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean I'd get a hatchet and go out in
Speaker 4: the middle of the night and just you know, start
Speaker 4: clearing branches off of trees and bringing them home. Which,
Speaker 4: so this is one thing that I think is going
Speaker 4: to be fascinating to a lot of our fellow listeners
Speaker 4: when they are as they explore unobscured. Is the process
Speaker 4: through which you discover these stories? Could you tell us
Speaker 4: a little bit more about the primary written records that
Speaker 4: you found, or how complete or incomplete they were, and
Speaker 4: how you took this this vast amount of uncollected resources,
Speaker 4: like how did you arrange them?
Speaker 1: And what was the process? Like was it all uphill?
Speaker 1: Were there surprising fines? Were there times where you know,
Speaker 1: it was frustrating because again, the great game of telephone
Speaker 1: that is human history got in the way. I think
Speaker 1: we're all very curious to learn about that.
Speaker 4: Well, one thing to keep in mind is that toward
Speaker 4: the end of the which trial period of sixteen ninety two,
Speaker 4: it basically starts in January sixteen ninety two, it runs
Speaker 4: through itun till about May of sixteen ninety three, and
Speaker 4: toward the end of that, the governor of Massachusetts is
Speaker 4: this guy named Sir William Phipps, and he realizes that
Speaker 4: the public perception of what's going on in the trials
Speaker 4: is bad. In fact, at some point, the judges involved
Speaker 4: in the trial hire a minister from a prominent minister family.
Speaker 4: Their last name was Mather. Increase was the father. Cotton
Speaker 4: was the son Cotton Mather. That's right, Cotton and Cotton
Speaker 4: was hired to basically write a pr piece. It was
Speaker 4: a book in defense of the sale Witch trials and
Speaker 4: write about that time, Governor Phipps decides it will be
Speaker 4: very bad if anybody else prints things about this. We
Speaker 4: want this to be the only thing out there. And
Speaker 4: so the governor outlaws the press. They can't talk or
Speaker 4: write about the sale Witch trials anymore. So you have
Speaker 4: that which limits the amount of stuff that's written about
Speaker 4: it in sixteen ninety two, sixteen ninety three. Then you
Speaker 4: have people with you know, let's just pick a judge
Speaker 4: out of you know, like Nathaniel Saltonstall or somebody like that,
Speaker 4: or Samuel Sewell. There are family documents that would have existed.
Speaker 4: Personal journals was a big thing for a lot of
Speaker 4: these judges. They wrote in their journals every night, and
Speaker 4: a lot of them just go missing. Letters between judges
Speaker 4: who served on the trial and family members kind of
Speaker 4: take a break for about a year there where they
Speaker 4: just they've vanished. It's not like they stopped writing. Somebody's
Speaker 4: gone in and they've taken these sheaves of paper out
Speaker 4: and they've destroyed them in some way. Samuel Paris himself,
Speaker 4: the Minister for you know, thirteen fourteen, fifteen months, kept
Speaker 4: notebooks of what was going on, and one page was
Speaker 4: pulled out of a notebook at some point and taken
Speaker 4: as evidence for something. We don't know how or why.
Speaker 4: But all the rest of the notebooks have vanished. It's
Speaker 4: not that they've been misplaced or you know, that the
Speaker 4: family just won't give them up. They just don't exist anymore.
Speaker 4: There's this almost global cover up of the documentation of
Speaker 4: what happened. Once the government gets on its feet in
Speaker 4: late sixteen ninety two and the Oier Interminer is shut
Speaker 4: down and it becomes the Superior Court, essentially the state
Speaker 4: supreme Court, the documents don't go away anymore. Those become
Speaker 4: really official, and we still have all those, but all
Speaker 4: the court documents from the Oyer and Terminer, the big trial,
Speaker 4: all through the summer of sixteen ninety two, it's just gone.
Speaker 4: So there's not a lot to look at there is stuff.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna plug the website just because it's got great
Speaker 4: resources on it. But if you go to History Unobscured
Speaker 4: dot com, there's a resources page and I can't remember
Speaker 4: if it's on there if I need to put it
Speaker 4: on there, but there's a link to is that the
Speaker 4: University of Virginia that has a like a digital scanned
Speaker 4: in library of every document relating to it. So things
Speaker 4: like the warrant that was issued for Reverend George Burrows.
Speaker 4: Like you can see the warrant right there, written out
Speaker 4: in handwriting, long form. It's got dates on and everything.
Speaker 4: It's beautiful. It's tragic. So there are things that we
Speaker 4: have and we still find things. You know, every year,
Speaker 4: somebody's bumping into a new document, some family opens up
Speaker 4: a book in their library and finds a warrant or
Speaker 4: a letter that was tucked away, like it happens. But
Speaker 4: a lot of it's just sort of disappeared.
Speaker 2: You know. I think this right here is the stuff
Speaker 2: they don't want you to know about the Salem Witch Trials.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine now, in this in modern history, if
Speaker 2: someone attempted to do this, just if it was a
Speaker 2: a year long process, somewhere and someone said, oh, nope,
Speaker 2: we're going to strike this whole thing from the record. Nope,
Speaker 2: everybody put away your social media. Nope, we're going to
Speaker 2: delete everybody's Facebook. It's over. This didn't happen. Here's the
Speaker 2: official account in this one ton or this one blog.
Speaker 2: All right, carry on. That's insane to me that that
Speaker 2: could even happen. But you know, we did. Where did
Speaker 2: we go? We went to the Danvers Archival, the Danvers
Speaker 2: Archival Center.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the Peabody Essex Library, a Peabody Institute library
Speaker 4: that's in Danvers. Peboty's another town, but the Danvers Library
Speaker 4: is actually called the Peabody Institute Library. It's confusing, but
Speaker 4: they have an archive in the basement. They have an archivist.
Speaker 4: One of our historians, Richard Trask, is a you know,
Speaker 4: decades long experienced historian. He's also descended from a number
Speaker 4: of the victims from the witch trials, and he lives
Speaker 4: within blocks of where it all happened, in a period home.
Speaker 4: He's a cool guy. I like Richard a lot. And
Speaker 4: he sits as the archivist down there in the bowels
Speaker 4: of the library and he manages all these amazing things
Speaker 4: the church changed locations. They moved across the street. A
Speaker 4: few years after it was all over, they got a
Speaker 4: new minister, Reverend Green, maybe in the sixteen ninety eight
Speaker 4: ninety nine range or so. He moved the building across
Speaker 4: the street. And then eventually that was, you know, tore
Speaker 4: down and they built a bigger building because it's a church,
Speaker 4: and they grow and populations grow. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: I think there was a fire at the church and
Speaker 4: Richard Drask went with the fire department and was able
Speaker 4: to get in and save some things. He saved the
Speaker 4: original communion where you know, like the chalice, the bowl,
Speaker 4: those things they're made out of pewter. But they were
Speaker 4: in a box right by the door, and on purpose,
Speaker 4: like he told them to keep them by the door.
Speaker 4: And there was a fire, and then two books were saved.
Speaker 4: One is think of them both as like ship's logs,
Speaker 4: you know, you think like Picard talking to the computer
Speaker 4: in his ready room, you know, ship's log date whatever.
Speaker 4: So there was there was a log for the church itself,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people wrote in it, whoever were
Speaker 4: officers and important people would write in there, like you know,
Speaker 4: we excommunicated you know Martha Corey on this date, or
Speaker 4: we brought in this member this date. It's sort of
Speaker 4: a happenings of the church. That book from sixteen ninety
Speaker 4: two was saved as well as the Minister's Book, which
Speaker 4: is sort of a ship's log for the minister, and
Speaker 4: that has Samuel Parris's writing in it, detailing things that
Speaker 4: are going on, writing about the events, and when he
Speaker 4: left and Reverend Green came in, that book was handed
Speaker 4: off to Reverend Green and then he takes over writing
Speaker 4: in it, and it's almost like a diary for whoever
Speaker 4: holds the position of minister.
Speaker 2: So cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and to get to see them at hold them
Speaker 4: and look at them, it's just they're amazing.
Speaker 2: And we'll continue to explore this in just a moment
Speaker 2: after a quick word from our sponsor, and we're back.
Speaker 1: One of the crucial things about reading these primary sources,
Speaker 1: finding these contemporary or near contemporary accounts, is that because
Speaker 1: they are so much closer to the time in which
Speaker 1: these actual events occurred, they do not suffer from some
Speaker 1: of the frankly widespread misconceptions that we have in the
Speaker 1: modern day, not just in the world of Hollywood, but
Speaker 1: in the cultural zeitgeist, even in academic settings.
Speaker 2: So what.
Speaker 1: If you could tell us here and what were some
Speaker 1: of the misconceptions that you found in the course of
Speaker 1: your work on Unobscured.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I have this belief that people like
Speaker 4: to sum things up into a sentence. You know, we
Speaker 4: like to say, oh, I understand that, you know it
Speaker 4: was this, it was simple, right, Like to be able
Speaker 4: to declare something as simple means that we've grasped it
Speaker 4: and were in control of it. And you can't do
Speaker 4: that with the Salem witch trials. It wasn't simple. It
Speaker 4: was highly complex. So one of the most common questions
Speaker 4: that I get, whether it's social media or in person,
Speaker 4: regarding the Salem witch trials is well, why did it happen?
Speaker 4: You know? And I think that that's our inclination. It's
Speaker 4: a noble question, it's good, But it's people saying, give
Speaker 4: me that one sentence that explains why. What's the one answer?
Speaker 4: And there isn't There isn't a one answer. Again, I
Speaker 4: harken back to what doctor Baker wrote for his book
Speaker 4: The Storm of Witchcraft. It's got this great introduction by
Speaker 4: somebody else that talks about how it's the perfect storm.
Speaker 4: Of all these elements that come together before I go
Speaker 4: on to what maybe they were misconceptions. You know, the
Speaker 4: big one that I always get is, oh, it was
Speaker 4: just rotten bread, right, It was that ergot poison stuff, right,
Speaker 4: I thought. We started doing the show, hopefully you have learned. Yes,
Speaker 4: But you know, ergot is this fungus that grows on grains.
Speaker 4: We hear about it as rye, and people make bread
Speaker 4: out of rye, among other things. He makes a good
Speaker 4: bourbon on a rye. But this, this fungus can cause hallucinations.
Speaker 4: And the idea was put forward in the mid seventies
Speaker 4: that hey, what if these people were having hallucinations and
Speaker 4: that explains why they were behaving so bad. They can
Speaker 4: have convulsions too, and you know, some of the afflicted
Speaker 4: girls as we call them, the people who were showing
Speaker 4: symptoms of being attacked by the witches, they had convulsions
Speaker 4: and fits. They would fall on the floor and thrash around. So,
Speaker 4: you know, hey, sounds like Ergo explains this. And the
Speaker 4: very next month after that was published in a journal,
Speaker 4: the same journal published a debunking of it. You know,
Speaker 4: two more scientists came on board and said, no, look,
Speaker 4: it can't be er goot point and here's why. Or
Speaker 4: got poisoning reacts to you one of two ways, depending
Speaker 4: on how you eat. If you are deficient in vitamin A,
Speaker 4: you will probably have hallucinations and convulsions. They call it
Speaker 4: convulsing or got poisoning something like that. But that's only
Speaker 4: one of the ways the symptoms can present themselves. The
Speaker 4: other way would be gangreen. And I get that those
Speaker 4: are wildly disparate responses for something in your body. You know,
Speaker 4: you can either have convulsions and hallucinations or you can
Speaker 4: have gangreen, you know, like pick and I would certainly
Speaker 4: grab the convulsions myself and skip the gangreen. But you
Speaker 4: have to be deficient in vitamin A to have the convulsions,
Speaker 4: and vitamin A comes from things like seafood. And Salem
Speaker 4: is a coastal town, a ports city, and most of
Speaker 4: the victims, the afflicted girls who have these symptoms are wealthy,
Speaker 4: and they could have afforded to have good food and
Speaker 4: would have been eating food from the sea. They would
Speaker 4: not have been deficient to invite them in a so
Speaker 4: because nobody ever gets reported as having gangreen, we can
Speaker 4: ride away right off or got poisoning. I sometimes hear people, Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean it's kind of like a oh you pop
Speaker 4: my bubble, why'd you do that? But we want there
Speaker 4: to be the magic pill, right, We want to say, oh,
Speaker 4: it was the one thing. And if we could go
Speaker 4: back in time in a time machine and like in
Speaker 4: one day, fix everything and make it not happen, we'll
Speaker 4: just take away their grain because it's got focus on
Speaker 4: it right. Well, it wouldn't work. It's more complex than that,
Speaker 4: you know. And you have a lot of people suffering
Speaker 4: from what was essentially post traumatic stress disorder, refugees coming
Speaker 4: from the middle of Maine down the coast back to
Speaker 4: New England, back to Salem where they had come from
Speaker 4: years before, because they kept trying to settle the coast
Speaker 4: of Maine. But up there you had the Wabanaki and
Speaker 4: the Algonquin, and you had the French who were allied
Speaker 4: with them, and they were constantly hammering back down to
Speaker 4: the south. And these refugees, like they'd go up and
Speaker 4: they'd settle, and they'd lived for a couple of years,
Speaker 4: and then they'd get raided and attacked and they would
Speaker 4: flee back south, having lost everything they ever took with
Speaker 4: them and it was horrible. It was it was warping.
Speaker 4: Some of them watched their parents die, some of them
Speaker 4: lost children. And so they come back to Salem and
Speaker 4: they tell their stories, and you know, they passed this
Speaker 4: trauma on to the people there. Everything outside their borders
Speaker 4: was darkness and evil and danger and they were afraid.
Speaker 4: And of course we mentioned the lack of the charter.
Speaker 4: They didn't have a government at the time. It was very,
Speaker 4: very tricky. One of the things the government was doing
Speaker 4: is I think it was with when Governor Andros took
Speaker 4: over before Phipps, Like they started to re tax property
Speaker 4: that had already been taxed and so you had paid
Speaker 4: your tax and you had your profit leftover and now
Speaker 4: you're going to get taxed again. So financially they were
Speaker 4: getting hammered. They had an incompetent leader who didn't understand
Speaker 4: how to goned because he had never done it before.
Speaker 4: Governor Phipps. All these all these pieces helped to kind
Speaker 4: of mix in the bawl and be this perfect storm
Speaker 4: that that in that window of time, that's that's when
Speaker 4: it could have happened, and it did.
Speaker 1: Well well said well put this also this this also
Speaker 1: reminds me of a work by the author Carol Carlson,
Speaker 1: The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, that I
Speaker 1: wanted to wanted to ask you about, because in Carlson's examination, uh,
Speaker 1: what what this author is looking at is more of
Speaker 1: a an emphasis on how certain women, primarily women, were
Speaker 1: chosen to be accused of witchcraft, and Carlson argues that
Speaker 1: there is a a violation of social hierarchy that occurs
Speaker 1: in some case. This is I think one of the
Speaker 1: specific quotes is that the accusers and the accused were
Speaker 1: in a way in a negotiation about the legitimacy of
Speaker 1: female discontent, resentment, and anger, because it's not too far
Speaker 1: of an assumption to say this was probably a severely
Speaker 1: patriarchal society.
Speaker 4: Is that correct? Oh? Absolutely, yeah. You know. One of
Speaker 4: the historians that we spoke to, we spoke to six,
Speaker 4: did great interviews with them. One of them is doctor
Speaker 4: Jane Kamenski. She's a professor of history at Harvard, which
Speaker 4: is a school I think some people have heard of,
Speaker 4: but she's also the director of the library there, Schlushinger Library,
Speaker 4: which is essentially a library devoted to women's studies through history.
Speaker 4: So we wanted. We wanted a perspective, a historical perspective
Speaker 4: on what sort of a voice did women have in
Speaker 4: that age, what was their place in society, what was
Speaker 4: seen as wrong, what was seen as good? You know,
Speaker 4: things like women in sixteen ninety two would have been
Speaker 4: able to read because they needed to read the scripture
Speaker 4: to their family, but they wouldn't necessarily have been able
Speaker 4: to write. So, you know, years later, when Reverend Green
Speaker 4: takes over the one of the afflicted girls, one of
Speaker 4: the girls who accused people and got them killed, wanted
Speaker 4: to join the church. And her confession is in that
Speaker 4: churches book that I talked about that saved from the fire,
Speaker 4: but it's in the reverence handwriting, and then she scrawls
Speaker 4: her signature underneath it because she couldn't write. She could read,
Speaker 4: but she couldn't write, And that was pretty common for
Speaker 4: women back then. It was, you know, partly out of this,
Speaker 4: you know, what was necessary for them, what wasn't necessary.
Speaker 4: There's a little bit of control in there too. If
Speaker 4: they can't read or if they can't write, then they
Speaker 4: can't you know, get involved in government and things like that.
Speaker 4: And so there was a patriarchal you know, push down
Speaker 4: on that as well. It is really bizarre what happens
Speaker 4: in the Salem witch trials because in effect, you have
Speaker 4: not only women, but you have young women, girls twelve, thirteen,
Speaker 4: fourteen years old, who begin to guide the process of
Speaker 4: the court like their word is taken as law. And
Speaker 4: these judges, these educated men, a lot of them had
Speaker 4: gone to Harvard Divinity School, like they were either just
Speaker 4: shy of being ministers themselves or could very well go
Speaker 4: out and get a job as a minister, who were
Speaker 4: some of the most educated people of the day. They
Speaker 4: were doing basically doing their bidding, you know, And so
Speaker 4: these roles are reversed. There's the shift there, and you
Speaker 4: have to wonder, like you said, in a time when
Speaker 4: women are told to shut up and be quiet, sit down,
Speaker 4: and do what you're told, that they have this opportunity
Speaker 4: all of a sudden, they notice an opening right that
Speaker 4: they're being listened to and things are being done based
Speaker 4: on their stories. And you have to think at least
Speaker 4: some of them sort of leaned into that that I
Speaker 4: have freedom right now, and I'm going to use this
Speaker 4: freedom right now. And you know, I haven't seen any
Speaker 4: study that looks at the list of victims who are
Speaker 4: accused by these people. But you know, I wonder how
Speaker 4: many of them were sort of like pro traditional women,
Speaker 4: sort of women like you know, Rebecca Nurse was seventy six,
Speaker 4: and maybe she was one of those people that tow
Speaker 4: the line and say, look, I'm a good, quiet Christian woman,
Speaker 4: I'm not going to speak up. I have to wonder
Speaker 4: if there's a little bit of a social battle going
Speaker 4: on there. You know, we know that twenty years before
Speaker 4: the Saling witch Trials, there was an event in Grotten.
Speaker 4: One of the ministers who pops up in the witch
Speaker 4: trials is this guy named Samuel Willard. I think twenty
Speaker 4: years before he was in Groton, and he had a
Speaker 4: household servant who was having fits and seizures and was
Speaker 4: speaking about the devil and the book like it's all
Speaker 4: these elements that come right from the Sailing Witch Trials,
Speaker 4: but it was twenty years before, and I see a
Speaker 4: lot of the servant speaking out and having a voice
Speaker 4: for you know, a few months. And that's a pretty
Speaker 4: easy way to view these things. I don't know if
Speaker 4: I'm reading into it, if I'm applying my own perceptions
Speaker 4: onto it, but they're certainly speaking out.
Speaker 2: You know, another person we interviewed, Mary Beth Norton, who's
Speaker 2: an author as well as a professor. She makes a
Speaker 2: great point about that consolidation of power that you were
Speaker 2: talking about erin where the same men who are running
Speaker 2: the church are also the judge, jury, and executioner essentially,
Speaker 2: so like all four points essentially are covered by the
Speaker 2: same old white men who are the best writers and
Speaker 2: readers and learned men of the time. And it really
Speaker 2: does bring home that idea of these young women fighting
Speaker 2: back in any way they possibly could to be seen
Speaker 2: and to be heard and to be known.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I mean, I think the way she describes
Speaker 4: it as like, let's pretend today that the presidents at
Speaker 4: his cabinet, Secretary of Interior, Secretary of State, all these
Speaker 4: this very small window of people. They also all served
Speaker 4: as the Supreme Court, and they served as the legislative branch,
Speaker 4: and that was the government, and that's what it was
Speaker 4: like in sixteen ninety two. I want to be careful
Speaker 4: with leading people to believe that the afflicted girls were
Speaker 4: a social movement, because there might have been part of that,
Speaker 4: but again, it's not a neat and clean, black and
Speaker 4: white thing. Some of the afflicted girls were literally refugees
Speaker 4: from Maine who had come down having watched their entire
Speaker 4: families killed and were afraid for their life every single day.
Speaker 4: There was a lot of PTSD in there. There were
Speaker 4: some social things going on, some of the better off
Speaker 4: families versus competitive families, you know. So it's this big mix.
Speaker 4: But I think it would be wrong to say that
Speaker 4: there isn't some aspect of this rebellion against the patriarchy
Speaker 4: going in there. It's not the only thing, it's not
Speaker 4: even the primary thing, but there's an element of that
Speaker 4: in there for sure.
Speaker 2: Well, Aaron, we were coming to the end here, what well?
Speaker 2: And which, by the way, Unobscured season one about the
Speaker 2: Salem witch trials is finishing. I believe when we're when
Speaker 2: this episode is available, the last major episode will be out.
Speaker 2: So you can go and listen to all twelve episodes
Speaker 2: right now of Unobscure. Yeah, there are there are gonna
Speaker 2: be some other episodes that come out though, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the season is twelve episodes long, twelve episodes,
Speaker 4: you know, the story from start to finish, which, by
Speaker 4: the way, if like, if you want to get away
Speaker 4: from the political arguments in your household, grab your iPhone
Speaker 4: and your headphones, and just go find a dark room
Speaker 4: and sit and binge listen to Unobscured. It's a great
Speaker 4: way to do it. And uh, because at least there's
Speaker 4: some hope at the end of the tunnel on that one.
Speaker 4: And so when we get back into the new year,
Speaker 4: we're gonna take those six interviews we did with the
Speaker 4: six historians doctor Emerson Baker, doctor Richard Trask, doctor Jane Kaminski,
Speaker 4: Mary Beth Norton, Marilyn k Roach, and Stacy Schiff. Hey,
Speaker 4: I got them all, and we're gonna we're gonna publish
Speaker 4: them weekly, one at a time, all six of the
Speaker 4: interviews polished up and put together nicely so that you know,
Speaker 4: because Unobscured is narrative storytelling. It's me telling a story
Speaker 4: for forty five minutes, and then every now and then
Speaker 4: you'll hear like doctor Baker jump in and talk for
Speaker 4: fifteen seconds to get a point across for me. But
Speaker 4: we never get all of his interview, and it's it's
Speaker 4: a great interview. So this is our way of sharing
Speaker 4: those big conversations with people. And you can just sit
Speaker 4: in front of the fire hose and drink and it's awesome.
Speaker 4: I concur sounds like a plan.
Speaker 2: So erin before we leave. What is the one big
Speaker 2: lesson that you have learned from making this show that
Speaker 2: we should in turn learned.
Speaker 4: That's wait, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2: Right, teach us the secrets of the universe. Aaron, please hurry.
Speaker 4: Point of order, Matt Frederick.
Speaker 1: Part of our exploration today was how it was about
Speaker 1: how difficult.
Speaker 4: And misleading it is. I know, thanks absolute things.
Speaker 2: I'm trying. I'm trying to get magic magic out of
Speaker 2: this thing.
Speaker 4: No, I hear you. No, Look I will say that
Speaker 4: I'm ann echo something I heard somebody say earlier. It's
Speaker 4: really really important to remember that these were people that
Speaker 4: we look back with three hundred and twenty six years
Speaker 4: of distance and say crazy like they shouldn't have done that.
Speaker 4: I would totally do things different if I was in
Speaker 4: their shoes, and you know what, you probably wouldn't because
Speaker 4: of the way it was built, the structure, the social,
Speaker 4: the religious, the government, the wars and the weather and
Speaker 4: all of those pieces. I think we would all do
Speaker 4: the same thing. And I think it's important for us
Speaker 4: in any historical situation, but especially the same witch trials
Speaker 4: to look back at it and say, these are just people.
Speaker 4: They have hopes and they have dreams, they have fears,
Speaker 4: they have insecurities, they have talents, they have desires to
Speaker 4: be on stage, they have desires to slip and hide
Speaker 4: under the radar, whatever it is like, these are just
Speaker 4: normal people like us. And if we forget that, that's
Speaker 4: when we start to misunderstand history. And that's one of
Speaker 4: the biggest lessons that I can take away from this.
Speaker 2: Oh man, that was so much more than I even expected. Okay,
Speaker 2: thank you Erin, You're very welcome, sir.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sincerely, thank you so much, and thank you listeners
Speaker 1: for joining us today. As we said earlier, can you can,
Speaker 1: if need be escape holiday time with your family or
Speaker 1: just in interest of enjoying a fascinating deep dive into
Speaker 1: a widely misunderstood period of American history. You can find
Speaker 1: Unobscured in its entirety now wherever you find your favorite
Speaker 1: shows and Aaron mentioned earlier the website, which is chock
Speaker 1: full of some excellent additional resources, including for our more
Speaker 1: visually driven audience members, maps and diagrams of the surrounding
Speaker 1: area to really put you in the place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as well as books if you want to continue
Speaker 2: your reading and learning.
Speaker 1: So once again that is unobscured season one. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to try to finagle any juicy tidbits about season
Speaker 1: two out just yet, so you'll have to take our
Speaker 1: word to stay tuned, look forward. Let us know what
Speaker 1: you think about Utam Steward. Let us know which historical
Speaker 1: lessons you feel can be drawn from this series of
Speaker 1: events in sixteen ninety two.
Speaker 2: Again, Aaron, any last words before we.
Speaker 4: Leave, Have fun with the show, dig in, listen and
Speaker 4: enjoy and learn something. And thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: Guys, thank you so much for being with us. All right,
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