When Did We Start Calling Things "Witch Hunts"?

One of the reasons that it took so long for ?witch hunt? to gain metaphorical currency is that there was little self-reflection after the Salem trials. Most people placed all of the blame on the young women who identified the witches. The General Court of Massachusetts, for example, noted that the accusers ?have since discovered themselves to be persons of profligate and vicious conversation.? Samuel Sewall appears to be the only of the five judges to apologize. Others seem to have destroyed their records and personal correspondence from the period. It was decades, or even a century, before people began to seriously question how civil society could have allowed the prosecutions to proceed. Some historians now believe that a panic over marauding Indians, who were supposedly aided by colonial witches, led to the trials, much like fear of Trotskyism led to the Soviet witch hunts of the 1930s, and fear of communism spawned the McCarthy era.

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