Revisiting Americanus Novus: Anglicization Crisis and Salem Witch Trials in Seventeenth Century New England

In the quadricentennial of the founding of Plymouth Plantation, recent challenges in the United States politics and society raise critical questions on American identity and American democracy. Thus, calling for a revisit on the seventeenth century northeastern American experience of English colonizers, contemporary academia is engaged in new approaches and perspectives on American history and historicism, whereby a peculiar sense of past and act of remembrance count for present day cultural and political dilemmas across the United States. The legacy of early founders and pioneers of New England colonies provides a host of historicism on Anglo-American identity, which was elaborately imprinted in colonial accounts on material culture, legal, military, political and religious practices in the nexus of intra- and extra-imperial encounters of metropole and the colony itself. This article aims to examine the theological and political grounds for 1692-93 Salem witch trial accounts by Cotton Mather in his The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being An Account of the Tryals of Several Witches Lately Executed In New England (1692) as a reflection of post-1691 Anglicization crisis in New England.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Anglo-American identity, colonialism, Anglicization, witchcraft

Revisiting Americanus Novus: Anglicization Crisis and Salem Witch Trials in Seventeenth Century New England

Keywords:

Anglo-American identity, colonialism, Anglicization, Witchcraft,

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