Witches

Stacy Schiff is one of America's most acclaimed and popular historians. She is the author of VÉRA (MRS VLADIMIR NABOKOV), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; SAINT-EXUPÉRY, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; A GREAT IMPROVISATION: FRANKLIN, FRANCE, AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICA, winner of the George Washington Book Prize; and CLEOPATRA: A LIFE. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.www.stacyschiff.com | @stacyschiff | facebook.com/stacyschiff

Stacy Schiff's The Witches deals with a horror we assume we know, but don't: the moral panic that tore apart the towns of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Adolescent girls, denouncing their neighbours, began a fashion for denunciation; it resulted in nineteen hangings, in torture, in the fracture of families and communities, and in the spectacle of a seven-year-old kept in miniature manacles. Was it like The Crucible? No, it was worse. Arthur Miller used the Salem story as a metaphor for the McCarthy era's paranoia. But using the past as stand-in for the present often sells it short, and gives its complexities permission to elude us. Context is everything, and Schiff defines it; she interrogates her sources, makes every detail count, and her style is intriguing - sharp-eyed, discriminating, crisp. You want to understand the subject, and you want to meet the historian.