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The Salem witch trials
Witch trials were prosecutions for having made a pact with the devil, and they had cost tens of thousands of lives in Europe over two centuries. Salem is small in numbers — Europe executed tens of thousands — but it has become a fixed reference point in American self-understanding because the proceedings were repudiated so quickly and so plainly. Spectral evidence is the crux: when the evidence is unavailable for testing, the accusation cannot be answered. Massachusetts declared the trials unlawful in 1711 and paid compensation; the last person convicted was formally exonerated in 2022.
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