New Releases by John Putnam Demos

In the first edition of the Bancroft Prize-winning Entertaining Satan, John Putnam Demos presented an entirely new perspective on American witchcraft. By investigating the surviving historical documents of over a hundred actual witchcraft cases, he vividly recreated the world of New England during the witchcraft trials and brought to light fascinating information on the role of witchcraft in early American culture. Now Demos has revisited his original work and updated it to illustrate why these early Americans' strange views on witchcraft still matter to us today. He provides a new preface that puts forth a broader overview of witchcraft and looks at its place around the world--from ancient times right up to the present.

In 1817 a group of clergymen founded a Foreign Mission School in the rural village of Cornwall, Connecticut. In 1827 they closed its doors for ever, but during the intervening ten years they mounted an unprecedented experiment, with echoes that reverberate to the 21st century.