On May 26, 1647, long
before the famous Salem witchcraft trials, Windsor’s
Alse Young became the first person in the American
colonies to be executed for witchcraft. History
records her name and date of death – and that is
all. Seven years later in 1654, the townspeople of
Windsor accused Lydia Gilbert of directing a stray
bullet to kill Henry Stiles during a town militia
drill three years earlier. Although there was no
question that the bullet had come from the musket of
Thomas Allen, who had been duly convicted of
“homicide by misadventure” for that crime three
years before, Lydia Gilbert was tried, condemned and
hanged.
Join us at Windsor
Historical Society on Thursday, October 16th
at 7 p.m. to hear John Demos, Samuel Knight
Professor of History at Yale University, the
nation’s foremost scholar on early American
witchcraft, and direct descendent of John Putnam, a
lead prosecutor in the Salem witch trials, who will
speak on his just-published book The Enemy
Within: 2,000 years of Witch-Hunting in the Western
World. Using dramatic vignettes, Demos tells
the story of women and men from two continents
spanning a period of two thousand years -- all
accused of committing horrific supernatural crimes
by their families and neighbors and swiftly executed
in order to calm the community’s deep fear of
“evil”. Demos postulates that this cycle of
indictment and supposed justice has never ended. In
The Enemy Within, John Demos shows how modern
day witch-hunts like McCarthy’s search for
communists and the hysteria of child sex-abuse cases
in the 80s are the direct descendents of Cotton
Mather, the religious authorities of medieval Europe
and the Roman communities who rid themselves of
Christian cultists.
Cost for this program is
$6 for adults, $5 for seniors and students and $4
for WHS members. Copies of The Enemy Within
will be available for purchase at $25.95 and the
author will be happy to sign copies. The Society’s
new Faces of Windsor exhibition will be also
open after the lecture. Parking is available in the
Windsor Discovery Center parking lot and around
Palisado Green.
