Explain your rationale and provide evidence from the texts

Below is a classmates' posts. Respond in 150 words. Use pages 3-25 Beginnings to 1820

Support your classmates perspective with additional information from the texts. Support your response with MLA cited examples/quotes from each text.
Or, provide an alternative perspective to your classmates. Explain your rationale and provide evidence from the texts. Support your response with MLA cited examples/quotes from each text.

Classmate post:

During the period of conflict between Protestant England and Catholic France, a crisis arose involving the execution of multiple people on the basis of witchcraft: The Salem witch trials. I have always been interested in the history of Salem and the famous Massachusetts murders, so the portion of the introduction explaining how the crisis reflected complex transformation of colonial authority and identity was particularly intriguing to me (16).

The Salem witch trials have often been described as the result of mass paranoia, so I was interested to discover it likely unfolded in part from the competing ideals of the Puritan families of Salem and the controversial approach of Quakerism. As rivals to Puritanism and new "religious identities and competing understandings of the relationship between church and state" became more prevalent, Puritans focused their fears on the presence of the devil in Massachusetts rather than on social, political, and religious pressures, leading to the rise in fear of witchcraft among the Salem population. Although the crisis did not directly lead to the era of Enlightenment, The Salem witch trials proved to be a watershed moment, tied to dramatic social and economic changes during the late colonial period (18).

I hope to learn more about the era leading up to the Enlightenment period during our readings and to explore how the change in perception of women evolved. Although some Quaker ideas such as the provocative embrace of womens religious leadership supported the beginnings of feminist concepts, the idea of women as equals and feminist ideals were largely unimaginable during this period as proven by the mass number of women condemned during the witch hunt (17). I am excited to learn more about the early ideas of feminism found in our readings and how these ideas intersect with the religious and political upbringings of America.

Works Cited

Levine, Robert S., and Sandra M. Gustafson. Beginnings to 1820. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ninth ed., a, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017, pp. 325.

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