ISBN10: 1421424371, ISBN13: 9781421424378, [publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD] Softcover Paperback. Why have so many recent scholars of colonial witchcraft written sympathetically about the accusers while ignoring their victims?For most historians living through the fascist and communist tyrannies that culminated in World War II and the Cold War, the Salem witch trials signified the threat to truth and individual integrity posed by mass ideological movements. Work on the trials produced in this era, including Arthur Millers The Crucible and Marion L. Starkeys The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, left little doubt that most intellectuals sympathies lay with the twenty innocent victims who stood up to Puritan intolerance by choosing to go to their deaths rather than confess to crimes they had never committed.In Switching Sides, Tony Fels traces a remarkable shift in scholarly interpretations of the Salem witch hunt from the postWorld War II era up through the present. Fels explains that for a new generation of historians influenced by the radicalism of the New Left in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Salem panic acquired a startlingly different meaning. Determined to champion the common people of colonial New England, dismissive toward liberal values, and no longer instinctively wary of utopian belief systems, the leading works on the subject to emerge from 1969 through the early 2000s highlighted economic ...