Historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum collaborated to write Salem Possessed when an experimental history course they were co-teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1969 yielded surprising discoveries about the Salem Witch Trials. In 1978, they worked together again to publish The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692, which have been praised as a valuable teaching tool and resource for historians.
Boyer was born in 1935 in Dayton, Ohio, and received his AB, MA, and PhD from Harvard. He was raised a Mennonite and served for two years in UNESCO’s International Voluntary Work Camps, and his...
