A Guide to the Primary Sources of the Salem Witch Trials
About this Guide
This website is a free portal to make it easier to access the on-line primary sources -- both in transcription and facsimile images -- of the Salem Witch Trials located at other websites on the internet. Most of the links will take you to the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive at the University of Virginia, others will take you to the Witchcraft Collection at the Cornell University Library website, and a few others will take you to other sites, such as the Library of Congress, Maryland State Archives and the NEHGS. Texts or images are generally not hosted at 17thc.us: these webpages are only an index to make locating what you want on-line easier.

What's in this Guide?
Contents of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
This is a list of the entries included in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt, Bernard Rosenthal, General Editor (Cambridge University Press, 2009), with links, as available, to facsimiles of the original manuscripts. The 71 new items not included in Salem Witchcraft Papers are hilited.

Cross-Reference: Salem Witchcraft Papers (1977) and Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
This page will help you if you have a citation in SWP and need to find it in Records, the new reference.

Cross-Reference: Woodward's Records of Salem Witchcraft (1864) and Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
This page will help you if you use Woodward and need to find something in the new Records.

Cross-Reference: Richard Godbeer's The Salem Witch Hunt (1e, 2011) and Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
Cross-Reference: Richard Godbeer's The Salem Witch Hunt (2e, 2017) and Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
These pages will help you if you are using the modernized transcriptions in both editions of Godbeer's book and want to refer to the unmodified transcriptions of 71 of them that are available in Records.

Cross-Reference: David Levin's What Happened in Salem? (2e, 1960) and Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
This page will help you if you are using Levin and need to find one of its 118 entries it in the new Records.

List of Accused People
This is a list of people who were accused of witchcraft, whose names appear in the legal records. Unlike the search feature, this list is based on names that are not only in the titles, but mentioned within the documents themselves, and will give you information about what kinds of evidence of the legal proceedings against this person exists in the primary sources.

If you are trying to understand what happened to a specific person, this handout is a helpful guide concerning what information you can find in which kinds of primary sources. NOTE: Permission is granted to teachers to reproduce this handout for class assignments, but please make sure to model appropriate behavior by giving credit where credit is due.
Search
Search the descriptive titles of the texts in the Guide. NOTE: The search currently searches the titles as they appear in Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. I am working on adding a Soundex option so that alternate spellings of names will be acceptable input (i.e., CLINTON and CLENTON, KOREY and CORY, PROCTOR and PROCTER, etc.), but until then, if you need to find a particular name, you may need to check how a name is spelled in Records, or use the above link to the list of Accused People.
Rare Books
There are many facsimiles and texts of rare books currently available in digital format on-line, and many different editions of the same books. Some are books known to have been read by the magistrates and ministers in Massachusetts, others were written in the years following the trials, others with public and private records of the period, and then later hard-to-find books about the episode (many from the 19th century). This will allow you to browse rare books by title and see what is available where. Many are located at Cornell and Virginia, but others are at the University of Michigan, Hanover College, Project Gutenberg, The Internet Archives and other hosts of eBook projects.
Library Books that you can "check out" digitally at Archive.org
You can get access to a lot of more current scholarship and other resources by using Archive.org's "library" feature: you can't download these books, but you can access them digitally an hour at a time. If no one else wants it, you can keep adding an hour. I looked up what books I have on my bookshelves and hunted down which of them you can check-out here, and the number of them was really remarkable!


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