1692 – The Salem witch trials are ended by a letter from Province of Massachusetts Bay Governor William Phips. The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused. Thirty people were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, died under torture for refusing to enter a plea, and at least five people died in the disease-ridden jails without trial. It was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America. Fourteen other women and two men were executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. The Salem witch trials only came to an end when serious doubts began to arise among leading clergymen about the validity of the spectral evidence that had been used to justify so many of the convictions, and due to the sheer number of those accused. In the years after the trials, "several of the accusers – mostly teenage girls – admitted that they had fabricated their charges." In 1702, the General Court of Massachusetts declared the trials "unlawful", and in 1711 the colonial legislature annulled the convictions. The episode is one of colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It was not entirely unique, but a colonial manifestation of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took the lives of tens of thousands in Europe. In America, Salem's events have been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process. Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been highly influential in the history of the United States. According to historian George Lincoln Burr, "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the [New England] theocracy shattered."
