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The timeline can be navigated with the “Scroll Left” and “Scroll Right” buttons or by dragging the pointer to a date on the timeline waveform (located at the bottom of the screen on the desktop version and on the left of the screen on mobile). To filter by a particular topic and see a smaller section of the data, make a selection on the dropdown “Filters” menu or click “Search” to do a keyword search. Hover over the abbreviated filter tags in the blue boxes to see the complete name of the filter, or click a filter to display all the data with this tag. If you want to take a deeper dive into a specific topic by viewing a narrative essay page and a curated timeline, click on “Stories.”

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A lithograph of a courtroom. A woman is depicted as unruly and angry, throwing books at the judges. Onlookers seem bewildered and amused.
Lithograph of a witch trial in Salem, Massachusetts by George H. Walker (1892).

The Salem witch trials begin.

Date: 1692

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Lithograph of a witch trial in Salem, Massachusetts by George H. Walker (1892).

More than 200 people are accused of witchcraft; 30 found guilty and 19 hanged. The first person killed is Tituba, an Indigenous (and possibly African) woman enslaved by British slaveholders in Barbados. This is often called the first case of "mass hysteria" in what will become the U.S. It is said that Tituba told stories from her life and the lives of others to the white girls she cared for, and the girls became "hysterical" and were deemed "possessed by the devil."