October 21, 2022
A Salem Witch: Dan Gagnon ’15 publishes biography of witch trial victim
By Michael Hagan ’15, ’19G
After majoring in history and developing skills in historical research as a student at Providence College, Dan Gagnon ’15 found the topic for his first book in his own hometown — the 1692 witch trials of Salem Village.
Salem Village became Danvers, Mass., where Gagnon grew up and continues to reside. Several historical sites dating to the 17th century are preserved there, including the Rebecca Nurse Homestead Museum, where Gagnon worked as a tour guide in high school.
Nurse was a 71-year-old grandmother when she was accused of witchcraft in March 1692. Because she was known about the village for her piety, her accusation and arrest were shocking. She was executed by hanging on July 19, 1692, one of 14 women and five men hanged in the witch trials.
At the homestead, Gagnon was introduced to a 70-page pamphlet about Nurse. To his knowledge, it was the most thorough account of her life in print. He saw a need for further scholarship. The result was his first book, A Salem Witch: The Trial, Execution, and Exoneration of Rebecca Nurse, published in 2021 by Westholme Publishing.
“No one has ever written a full biography of any of the Salem victims that includes details about their early lives and how they were remembered by later generations,” Gagnon said. “I thought ‘Maybe there’s a need for that kind of a book.’”
Gagnon also teaches history at Rockport High School, a career he began after completing a master’s degree in history at Boston College and earning his teaching license at Gordon College.
He began his book project with the 70-page pamphlet and a red pen, reading through and marking claims he found dubious based on his studies. He then undertook an extensive review of existing scholarship on the witch trials. The most difficult research involved primary sources, including trial documents that only became available in their entirety in recent decades.
The greatest challenge was reconstructing Nurse’s life before 1692.
“Due to poor records and the deliberate mistruths circulated at the time that tricked some 19th-century historians, I couldn’t take a single fact for granted — not even basic information like where she lived earlier in life,” Gagnon said.
Early in 2021, Gagnon sent a proposal for his nearly completed manuscript to several publishers. Westholme, an independent publisher of non-fiction trade books and The Journal of the American Revolution, accepted his proposal. Eight months later, Gagnon held a published copy of his work for the first time.
In A Salem Witch, Gagnon challenges previous interpretations of Rebecca Nurse’s life and the Salem Witch Trials generally.
He disrupts attempts by historians to neatly explain the witch trials as stemming from social division among residents of Salem Village. One view argues that the witch hunts were a veiled campaign to expropriate the land and wealth of Salem’s elite. Nurse, not being particularly wealthy, defies the theory. Another class-based thesis sees most accusations of witchcraft as originating in the western part of the village and targeting neighbors to the east. Nurse’s family defies this social and geographic delineation as well.
“Rebecca Nurse was the first accused who didn’t have any traits, other than her gender, that would make her likely to be accused,” Gagnon said.
Gagnon believes the accusation, trial, and execution of Nurse were turning points in the witch hunt — if she could be found guilty, anyone could be.
“Things might have begun innocently or with genuine mental illness, but it’s not long after Rebecca Nurse is accused that people are behaving fraudulently, making an increasing number of wild accusations,” Gagnon said.
Since its initial publication, A Salem Witch has had two additional printings. Each run totaled more than 1,000 copies. Gagnon has kept busy giving talks and book signings at libraries, historical societies, and locations including the Jonathan Corwin House in Salem (known as “the Witch House”) and the Peabody Essex Museum.
Gagnon is a member of the Rebecca Nurse Homestead Museum’s board of directors, an appointed member of the Salem Village Historic District Commission, and a member of the Danvers Historical Society. He has led walking tours of historical sites in Danvers related to the 1692 witch hunt. He also has written a peer-reviewed article, “Skeletons in the Closet: How the Actions of the Salem Witch Trials Victims’ Families in 1692 Affected Later Memorialization,” in The New England Journal of History.
This year, he is teaching an elective course on Massachusetts history in addition to U.S. and world history courses.
As an undergraduate at PC, where he minored in French language and literature and wrote for The Cowl, his interests were more global and contemporary than colonial Salem. He wrote a thesis on post-war European integration and the European Economic Community — a forerunner to the European Union — with the guidance of Matthew Dowling, Ph.D., assistant professor of history. He continued this research in graduate school, but over time, Salem and its rich history beckoned his focus home.
Gagnon credits Patrick Breen, Ph.D., associate professor of history, with teaching him how to “sniff out a bad source.” Such research skills were essential in discerning fact from fiction in the story of Rebecca Nurse.
The cover art selected by the publisher for Gagnon’s book is a photograph from the 1890s of pins kept at the Essex County courthouse law library. The pins were allegedly used in the witch trials by accusers who claimed the accused sent specters to stab them.
“Are they genuine artifacts? Who knows? They could just be very old paper clips,” Gagnon said — but they make an intriguing book cover.
When he is giving book talks, Gagnon says one questions always comes up: How could something like the witch trials have happened? How could a whole community get so caught up in lies and gossip with such deadly consequences?
“That question always presents a good opportunity to reflect on the fact that in any era, including our own, people often hold beliefs that aren’t grounded in the truth,” Gagnon said.
A Salem Witch is available for purchase through Westholme Publishing or Amazon. It is also available as an audiobook on Audible.
