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The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Nineteen of whom were executed by hanging. Arrests were made in even more towns beyond Salem.The grand juries and trials for this capital crime were conducted by a Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 and by a Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, both held in Salem Town, where the hangings also took place. It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of North America. Only fourteen other women and two men had been executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century.

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The episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process..People would accuse their neighbors of Witchcraft or their wives seducing them a lot of this came from the beliefs of the Puritans that if you had bad thoughts that the devil is trying to get into your head.A lot of people at this time work using their neighbors of doing witchcraft or being influenced by the devil in order to get your land. This was the thing to do at the time because of the witch trials and nobody was showing real evidence you were just accused and brought to jail. Easy for your next-door neighbor to take your land because then it would go up for sale and they would buy it and now they would have more property.

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The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries, who when out to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and needed to become more protestant. Some Puritan ideals, including the formal rejection of Roman Catholicism, were incorporated into the doctrines of the Church of England; others were absorbed into the many Protestant denominations.

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Calvinism is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and forms of Christian practice set down by John Calvin. Calvinists broke from the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century. The term Calvinism can be misleading, because the religious tradition which it denotes has always been diverse, with a wide range of influences rather than a single founder.The namesake of the movement, French reformer John Calvin, renounced Roman Catholicism and embraced Protestant views in the late 1520s or early 1530s, as the earliest notions of later Reformed tradition were already adopted by Huldrych Zwingli. The movement was first called Calvinism, referring to John Calvin.

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1. Swimming Test
They where tossed in to to see if they would sink or float. Since witches were believed to have spurned the sacrament of baptism. It was thought that the water would reject their body and prevent them from submerging.
2. Prayer Test
I was thought that witches were incapable of speaking scripture aloud. So accused sorcerers were made to recite selections from the Bible, usually the Lord’s Prayer without making mistakes.
5. Witch’s Marks
They would examined for signs of an unsightly blemish that witches were said to receive upon making their pact with Satan. This “Devil’s Mark” could supposedly change shape and color and was believed to be numb and insensitive to pain. they might also look for the “witches’ teat” an extra nipple allegedly used to suckle the witch’s helper animals.