The Salem witch hunt has been one of the most researched topics in American history. In this book, Tony Fels argues that five distinguished historians of witchcraft—Paul Boyer, Stephen Nissenbaum, John Demos, Carol Karlsen, and Mary Beth Norton—“lost sympathy for the victims of the Salem witch hunt” under the influence of the New Left, which (in his accounting) disdained “such fundamental liberal values as individual rights, due process, the rational pursuit of truth, tolerance of differing views, and respect for the rule of law . . . .” (125) Despite admitting that he has not tried “to learn anything about the political lives of these historians” (125), Fels believes that their work shares a common political bias. He describes his book not only as “an essay in historical interpretation” (xi) but also as a “criticism of the ideological foundations of an entire scholarly era” (xiii).

Since the late 1960s, Fels argues, historians have failed to acknowledge the suffering of those who were falsely accused of witchcraft. Focusing on four books—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Harvard University Press, 1976), John Demos's Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1982), Carol Karlsen's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), and Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Vintage, 2002)—Fels argues that “these works mostly ignore the victims of the witchcraft, occasionally even expressing hostility toward them, and either write sympathetically about the accusers or else shift the reader's attention away from the 1692 panic itself.” His language is harsh: “In these accounts the role of courageous individuals standing up to mass prejudice moves out of view. Instead, social conflict among groups takes center stage, even to the point of seeming to justify the witch hunt” (2). According to Fels, these critically acclaimed books illustrate the “moral deficiencies of their scholarly era” (3). In his lengthy footnotes, which make up half the book, Fels also criticizes dozens of other scholars of the Salem crisis.

Fels begins his book by praising Marion Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949) and Arthur Miller's play The Crucible (1953) because of their focus on individuals standing up to persecution. Though conceding the flaws of these books, including Starkey's portrait of the possessed girls as a “sorority” of “crazed little girls” (7) as well as Miller's decision to turn eleven-year-old Abigail Williams into a seventeen-year-old sexual temptress, Fels lauds these books for teaching a clear moral lesson about the evils of scapegoating.

In contrast, Fels is deeply troubled by the morally complex portrait of witch-hunting that emerged after the late 1960s. In response to Boyer and Nissenbaum's book, which argues that the Salem trials emerged in response to tensions over the rise of merchant capitalism, Fels argues that economic issues had nothing to do with the crisis. Accusing Boyer and Nissenbaum of being influenced by Marxism and romantic views of “anti-capitalist resistance” (28), he claims that they misrepresent witch-hunters as “fundamentally well-meaning folks who simply had allowed their justifiable anger to get out of hand” (22). He also complains that Boyer and Nissenbaum highlight the importance of social groups at the expense of individuals—an odd argument to make about a book that revolves around the conflict between two half-siblings in Salem: Thomas Putnam, Jr. and Joseph Putnam. Fels seems to believe that if historians focus on structural forces, they inevitably diminish the importance of personal decision-making and moral accountability.

Turning to John Demos's Entertaining Satan, Fels criticizes the book for taking a “functionalist perspective” on witch-hunting. Given the multilayered quality of Demos's book, which examines biography, history, psychology, and sociology, the word functionalist does not do justice to his methodology, and readers will undoubtedly be surprised by Fels's judgment that “the dominant vantage point taken is that of the accusers rather than of those accused of witchcraft” (51). On the contrary, as Fels briefly admits, Demos provides “brilliant case studies” of seven people accused of witchcraft (49). Yet Fels complains that Demos spends too much time “explaining how normal, ordinary, and sensible” witch-hunting seemed, “and how even the accused ‘witches’ to a surprising degree colluded in them” (51). Since Demos never describes witch-hunting as “sensible,” and, in fact, he emphasizes its irrational, psychological dimensions, this is not a fair characterization of his work, but he would almost certainly agree with Fels that his goal was to explain more than to judge. His book is designed to help readers understand the many forces that led seemingly ordinary men and women to accuse their neighbors of witchcraft. His approach does not mean that he has “switched sides” or “lost sympathy” for the victims of witch hunts, but only that he believes that understanding the past is the only way to avoid repeating it. Indeed, he ends his book by quoting from Emily Dickinson: “Witchcraft was hung, in History,/But History and I/Find all the Witchcraft that we need/Around us, every day—” (Demos, 400).

Fels is especially critical of Carol Karlsen and Mary Beth Norton, whose attention to gender and race he finds excessive. Though Fels acknowledges that 78% of those accused of witchcraft were women (60), he criticizes Karlsen for not paying more attention to male victims. Vexed by her (very brief) allusion to the fact that three of these men had been previously accused of abusing women, he criticizes her for exaggerating the extent of Puritan women's oppression. In his words, “her observation that many of the male suspects at Salem stood accused of verbally or physically abusing their wives or servants would have been better explained by linking these charges to the perceptions—and possible distortions—of pious accusers, strenuously aiming to uphold new standards of nonviolent, loving hierarchy, rather than to an unstated assumption of timeless, male domination” (69). Despite his complaints about Karlsen's “distorted” emphasis on “gender conflict,” (65) Fels offers no evidence of these “new standards of nonviolent, loving hierarchy;” nor does he acknowledge Karlsen's desire to treat both the perpetrators and victims of witch-hunting as fully human. He seems to think that historians should portray the victims of witch-hunting only as victims, not as real, flawed people who suffered tragic fates.

When Fels discusses Norton's book, he objects to the attention that historians have devoted to Tituba, an indigenous or African woman who confessed to practicing witchcraft. In a footnote, he explains that “the widespread and intense violence of King Philip's War in the 1670s” led many English “to regard Native Americans as fundamentally different from themselves” (204), and yet in his main text, he insists that the suspicion of Tituba was “not a result of her race, which appears to have been mostly irrelevant to the Puritans, for whom the world was divided between the godly and the unregenerate” (78).Though it is hard to reconcile such contradictory statements, it is clear that Fels believes that the “New Left” poisoned historians’ analysis of race.

Fels's most convincing critique of these four books is that they fail to consider the “religious factor” (69). Yet as his singular language indicates, he tends to isolate religion from other aspects of New England culture instead of examining the way that Protestantism shaped people's understandings of the economy, politics, race, the law, and gender. Switching Sides demonstrates Fels’ vision of the ideal historical method: he draws sharp distinctions between heroes and villains; he eschews nuance in favor of simplicity; and he ignores or minimizes race, gender, and class. Perhaps other historians share his longing for the scholarship of the late 1940s and 1950s. But given his suspicion of treating historical individuals as morally complex, many may return to Boyer and Nissenbaum, Demos, Karlsen, and Norton with new appreciation for their work.