Historical detection methods and applications

¶ … Detection

Historical methods: After the Fact

One of the most perplexing questions that still divide historians and social theorists alike is why the community of Salem, Massachusetts had an epidemic of mass hysteria, and condemned many individuals to death or imprisoned them as witches. Often, the allegations were made on the basis of children's testimony. In After the Fact, authors Davidson and Lytle present a case study of this period to highlight how the approach of historians Boyer and Nissenbaum provides some possible answers to this question. Boyer and Nissenbaum's demographic analysis revealed definite geographic patterns in the pattern of witchcraft accusations. These trends seemed to suggest that there was a bias against the newly emerging merchant classes of the community. The accusers tended to be drawn from the more established agrarian families of Salem and the accused from Salem Town. This community analysis of the crisis of town vs. village helps explain why the allegations of the girls were so persuasive. The aim of such historicism is not to be reductive; it does not suggest that the girls were 'forced' to tell tales, but it helps explain why there was such a fertile and suggestible environment and a desire to believe the girls' allegations.

Social history and documentary evidence through data, not grand theorizing, provide some of the most illuminating methodologies in After the Fact. The authors also show some of the darker, rapacious roots of the American colonies in the chapter entitled "Serving time in Virginia." They show how many of the early colonies were founded to make money, not settle or create new and lasting societies in the South. This chapter also illustrates how while first-hand accounts like John Smith's might be valuable for historians, other sources must be consulted to bring to light the biases and the self-presentation of the author. Every author who writes, including Cotton Mather in Salem and Smith in Jamestown has an agenda and possess a desire to paint a particular picture of himself to an audience. This is why Lytle and Davidson use first-hand narratives as only one piece of evidence. They are always quick contextualize personal narratives with hard, cold facts, like the evident death toll of the early colony, which they attribute to a failure to plant crops like corn for food. Settlers were foolishly determined to leave land and time open to cultivate the cash crop of tobacco. Laws forcing men to plant food suggest, according to the historians, that the settlers lacked a sense of what was necessary to survive times of scarcity during the winter -- and 3,000 of them died as a result. Statistics and primary source documents such as laws, records of immigration and even botanical information about the labor-intensive nature of farming tobacco vs. corn are required to fully flesh out a picture of what life was like and to solve the mystery of why the death toll was so high Virginia. The authors also offer an analysis of why slavery was not likely to have fueled the tobacco boom -- laws separating races were only passed during the 1660s, and the high mortality of the early slave trade made indentured servants a more profitable source of enforced labor.