Thursday, October 29
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Registration Required Below
Hear chilling true accounts of people accused of practicing witchcraft in early New England, and Connecticut’s central role in carrying out witch trials and executions with Leslie Lindenauer, a professor at Western Connecticut University.
When most people think about historic American witch trials, Salem is what comes to mind — and with good reason — in 1692 and 1693, Massachusetts courts sentenced 19 people to hang and tortured another person to death. Others died in jail. But Salem was far from the beginning of New England’s history of witchcraft accusations and trials.
Dozens — perhaps hundreds — of people were tried for witchcraft in New England beginning more than four decades before the Salem witch trials and many of those trials – and executions — took place in Connecticut, according to Lindenauer.
Learn about this dark chapter of American history — and how it has been represented in popular culture.
This presentation will take place both in-person, at the Library, and virtually, over Zoom. For the optimal experience, we recommend attending programs in-person. Register for the virtual event by scrolling to the registration form below. Click here to register for the in-person program.
About Our Speaker
Leslie Lindenauer is a professor at Western Connecticut State University in the Department of History, Philosophy, and World Perspectives. She teaches courses in early American history, public history and museum studies, local history and gender studies. Her research interests include the history and popular memory of witch trials, gender and the construction of motherhood in popular culture and the role of collective identity and public memory, including popular memory and the American Revolution. She is a graduate of Brown University, and holds a master’s degree and PhD from New York University. Her latest book, I Could Not Call Her Mother: The Stepmother in American Popular Culture, 1750-1960 was published by Lexington Books.