The Salem Witch Trials may well be the single most notorious and iconic event of America's colonial period. Every Halloween, Salem, Massachusetts, hosts untold thousands of tourists who revel in the city's occult history and reputation as America's haunted capital of spookiness.

But as well-known as the Salem Witch Trials are, they remain a hotbed of historical inaccuracy and misconception.

So what exactly happened? How did a sleepy, growing Massachusetts town become the epicenter of witch hysteria? Did everyone go insane, or were the Salem Witch Trials perfectly consistent with the worldview of Salem's citizens.

To help us clear this up, Kelly and John asked University of Pennsylvania history professor Kathleen M. Brown for her insights.

Brown is a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. Educated at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she is author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), which won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association.

Her latest, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, was published in 2023.