moab calamity

Bridget Bishop was one of the first people to be accused and executed during the witch trials in colonial Salem. The witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts from 1692 to 1693. Bridget Bishop was not the first person in Salem to be accused of witchcraft, but her trial marked a significant turning point in the hysteria that gripped the town. Bridget Bishop was a controversial and prominent figure in Salem. She had been accused of witchcraft in the past and had a questionable reputation. She was known as a tavern owner, which was considered a bold move for a woman during that time.

Fig 6. Witchcraft beliefs, anxiety, and worldview.

Each panel of the figure presents the results of estimating 7 different models, in which the metric of innovation indicated in the panel title is regressed on the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs, along with a set of control variables. The remaining 4 models, named Income, Religiosity, Kinship, and Institutions include, respectively, real GDP per capita, average religiosity, kinship intensity index, and the rule-of-law index in addition to continental fixed effects and geographic variables.

She was known as a tavern owner, which was considered a bold move for a woman during that time. Her flamboyant lifestyle, with brightly colored clothing and multiple marriages, made her an easy target for accusations of witchcraft. The specific accusations against Bridget Bishop were varied and included claims that she bewitched people, afflicted them with illness, and caused harm to livestock.

Witchcraft beliefs around the world: An exploratory analysis

This paper presents a new global dataset on contemporary witchcraft beliefs and investigates their correlates. Witchcraft beliefs cut across socio-demographic groups but are less widespread among the more educated and economically secure. Country-level variation in the prevalence of witchcraft beliefs is systematically linked to a number of cultural, institutional, psychological, and socioeconomic characteristics. Consistent with their hypothesized function of maintaining order and cohesion in the absence of effective governance mechanisms, witchcraft beliefs are more widespread in countries with weak institutions and correlate positively with conformist culture and in-group bias. Among the documented potential costs of witchcraft beliefs are disrupted social relations, high levels of anxiety, pessimistic worldview, lack of entrepreneurial culture and innovative activity.

Copyright: © 2022 Boris Gershman. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

One witness testified that Bishop had appeared to them as a specter and pinched them. Another witness claimed that Bishop had cursed her children, leading to their deaths. Bridget Bishop's trial took place in June 1692, and she was found guilty and sentenced to death. Despite the lack of concrete evidence, the court relied heavily on the testimonies of the accusers, who claimed to have seen Bishop engaging in witchcraft. It was a time of widespread fear and paranoia, and the court was willing to accept testimonies of spectral evidence, where witnesses claimed to have seen the accused person's spirit causing harm. On June 10, 1692, Bridget Bishop was taken to the gallows and hanged. Her execution was the first of many during the Salem witch trials. Over the next year, 19 people would be executed for witchcraft, and many more would be imprisoned or accused. Bridget Bishop's trial and execution marked a turning point in the Salem witch trials. It set a precedent for the type of evidence that would be accepted in subsequent trials, and it intensified the atmosphere of fear and suspicion in the town. The hysteria would continue to escalate until it reached its peak in September 1692, finally subsiding when the court stopped accepting spectral evidence. The Salem witch trials remain a dark chapter in American history, highlighting the dangers of mass hysteria and the consequences of unchecked fear..

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moab calamity