Witchcraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Samuel McIntire made this seaside town famous. But echoes of lesser-known tales linger along its lanes and avenues, from mysterious Chestnut Street to the founding Quakers of Buffum Street. Essex Street is one of the oldest in town, and the crooked street has carried several different names over the years, confusing tourists to this day. The Gedney House on High Street dates back to 1665 and was built by a shipwright, while the neighboring Pease and Price Bakery was a family-owned store that served the community for more than eighty years. Local historian and Salem News columnist Jeanne Stella recounts these and more stories of well-worn paths.

Painted with Thread is the catalogue accompaniment to the exhibition of the same name at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. This richly illustrated book emphasizes the art inherent in embroidery and contextualizes the examples within aesthetic movements. The objects and designs are myriad: "pictoral embroidery," wool and cotton sailor's pants embroidered with a running whorl stitch resembling tattoo art. Winding vines of flowers in full-bloom rendered to near botanical precision. Samplers sewn by schoolgirls, table covers, fire screens, valances as domestic artifacts with a resonance far beyond the home and the homespun. Painted with Thread presents a breathtaking array of historic American needlework.

A spellbinding, beautifully written novel that moves between contemporary times and one of the most fascinating and disturbing periods in American history - the Salem witch trials. Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest-to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge. As the pieces of Deliverance's harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem's dark past then she could have ever imagined. Written with astonishing conviction and grace, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane travels seamlessly between the witch trials of the 1690s and a modern woman's story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation.

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study. In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft “victims” described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history.

For over three hundred years, stories of witches, sea serpents and pirates have amazed and terrified residents of Massachusetts's North Shore. In the summer of 1692, phantom men were spotted in the fields of Gloucester. Farther north, "A" marks the spot for pirate treasure in the marshes of Newbury, while to the east, full moons might bring out the werewolf of Dogtown. The devil himself has burned his mark on the boulder-strewn landscape, while shaggy humanoids have been sighted loping along the coast. From Boston to New Hampshire, Massachusetts's North Shore is filled with remarkable stories and legendary characters. Join author Peter Muise and discover the North Shore's uncanny legends and tales of the paranormal.

Includes photographs of vintage postcards of Salem from the 1900s to the 1950s.

Decades after witch-hunting had begun to die down in Europe, North America was about to witness its bloodiest witch hunt in history. The Massachusetts of 1692 was a very different one to the state we know today. Populated by colonists, many of them a generation or less from life in an England bathed in religious turmoil,