United States History up to 1877 - Essay Example

Correspondingly, young girls were the chief accusers involved in demonstrating against various people for numerous offenses comprising practice of witchcraft. The leaders in the community promptly reacted to these accusation. As a consequence, many people were killed while certain other people were jailed which forced these people to acquire debt for jail charges. Eventually, as a consequence of this incident there was a loss of land along with hampering dignity of people as well as loss of lives (Linder 1-7).

The incident of witch hunt in Salem is ascertained to have happened due to various reasons and was widely prejudiced by the dread of the devil and the generally accepted belief that the devil would allocate witches with power to hurt people as a reward of their faithfulness. Salem was established by puritans during 1628. This era also reflected the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Under the regime of King Charles I, the puritans were granted with a royal approval to colonize the area.

However, Charles II revoked this charter in 1684 responding to the violation of charter rules by the colonists. These violations were mainly executed against the laws related with beliefs, religion and discrimination against Anglicans. These factors mainly represented the governmental causes behind the upheaval of the Salem witch trials. It can be argued that there were many other social and cultural factors that had significantly contributed towards the occurrence of Salem witch trials. In this regard, gender issue can be ascertained to be one of the major constituents related with the occurrence of Salem witch trials.

Responsively, many scholars propounded that a majority of the victims who were accused and executed for practicing witchcraft were women. It has been further determined that the victims involving women were the ones who were perceived as “not fit into the typical Puritan framework of a good and obedient wife”