Today's historian interview is with Professor Emerson Baker. He's the interim dean of graduate and professional studies, as well as a professor of history over at Salem State University.

Yes, that Salem. He's an award-winning author with many works on the history and archaeology of early New England, including a storm of witchcraft, the Salem Trials and the American Experience, which was a source for this series.

And the devil of Great Island, witchcraft and conflict in early New England, a great book about a stone-throwing devil in early colonial New Hampshire, something I covered on episode 94 of my other podcast, lore.

He served as an advisor for PBS TV's American Experience and Colonial House, and has consulted and appeared in many documentaries on the Salem Witch Trials.

He is a member of the Gallows Hill team, who in 2016 confirmed the execution site for the victims of the Salem Witch Trials, and he's also co-authored the iPhone iPad app, the Salem Witch Trials.

I had a chance to sit down with Professor Baker this past summer, and we had a fantastic conversation. So, without further delay, let's get on with the show.

This is the Unobscured Interview Series for season 1. I'm Aaron Mankey.

So, I'm Emerson Baker. I'm interim dean and professor of history at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts.

I'm going to start us off with sort of a setting the stage kind of question. Can you give us a brief placement of the Salem Trials in the context of colonial history?

We're about halfway between English settlement and the independence that will come later. How do the events in this particular era shape the mindsets, attitudes, practices that we might consider proto-American?

Sure. Well, I mean, I think Salem is kind of a great colonial American tragedy, right? Or one of several great tragedies, maybe King Phillips were being another one, which in some ways I believe they're kind of closely related.

There's many tensions emerging in New England in the 17th century. They perceive decline of Puritanism, declining church membership, issues over governance and the fall of the Charter of Massachusetts Bay colony, where people begin to doubt that the Puritan experiment is going to survive, right?

It's under threat. Who could it be under threat from more than anything else, of course, but Satan, right?

And to me, in many ways, it is a critical turning point in American history. And I'm not just saying that because my book is in a series called Pivotal Moments in American History, I genuinely believe this that the Salem Witch Trials in many ways changed the course of colonial history and maybe the very nature of American society to this day.

I read a quote from, I don't know if he's late 19th century, early 20th century historian who said that the Salem Witch Trials was the rock that the American idea of theocracy was broken upon.

Yeah. I don't think it's not like the Puritan state ended with the Salem Witch Trials, but it's the beginning of the end, right?

I think Cotton Mather in particular becomes pretty much completely discredited by his attempt to defend the Puritan state. And people begin to think, you know, maybe it isn't the best idea for the governor's top advisors to be the ministers of the colony, right?

And it's a gradual split. It's not like the light switch went off, right? But I think in many ways it's the Puritan Witch Trials, the Salem Witch Trials are the beginning of the end of Puritan Massachusetts.

And in some ways really kind of that beginning of the end of the New England experiment. And in particular, I think the complete collapse of that ideal of John Winthrop's of the city upon a hill.

And if you realize that Salem, of course, was the first settlement of Massachusetts Bay, and that Winthrop really may have physically had Salem in mind as the city upon the hill to have those high expectations completely dashed.

There were people still living in Salem who would have heard that sermon, right? They would have been quite old, but to think within a couple of generations that that that that experiment just lay in shambles. And I think to me, that's why that's why we remember Salem is because

it's too horrible a fall from grace for us to ever forget, and that people in Salem and other Americans constantly remind Salem and ourselves of what can happen when you get complacent about those dreams.

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