The Salem witchcraft affair may be divided into two major episodes; namely, the Salem Village witch-hunt and the Andover witch-hunt. The arrest phase of the Salem Village episode occurred over the four-month time period from March 1, 1692, to July 1, 1692. Only one Andover resident was arrested during that period: Martha Carrier, on May 31, 1692. All the complainants against Martha Carrier came from Salem Village, and she should be classified as a victim of the Salem Village witch-hunt. The arrest phase of the Andover witch-hunt began after the arrest phase of the Salem Village witch-hunt was over. All the arrests made in the Andover episode occurred during the eight-week period from July 15, 1692 to September 7, 1692. The first arrest was that of Ann Foster of Andover on July 15, 1692. She was accused by Joseph Ballard, an Andover neighbor. The final arrests of the Andover witch-hunt represented a spectacular outburst: eighteen arrests made at the Andover touch test on September 7, 1692. The Salem Village delusion has been well documented and exhaustively studied. The Salem Village episode and the Andover episode each involved about the same number of people imprisoned. However the Andover episode has never commanded an enthusiastic interest by the writers of Salem witchcraft. It seemed as if Andover were a minor outlier. Andover just did not fit into the scheme of things. There is one major difference in these two episodes. In the Salem Village witch-hunt essentially no one confessed to practicing witchcraft. In the Andover witch-hunt essentially everyone confessed to practicing witchcraft. From the official documents written down at the time, it would seem that the witch families of Andover had nothing better to do than fly about on broomsticks and attend black Sabbaths. And worst of all, the fantastical tales told by these witch families were believed by learned men in the Massachusetts Bay colony. This book explains why.
About the Author: Enders Anthony Robinson is the Professor Emeritus of Geophysics in the Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Chair at Columbia University in City of New York. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 18, 1930. He received from MIT a SB in mathematics in 1950, a SM in economics in 1952 and a PhD in geophysics in 1954. In 1950 vast areas of the world, including great sedimentary basins and nearly all water-covered regions, were impervious to oil exploration because of intrinsic limitations in analog methods. In 1950-1954 Robinson at MIT, as a research assistant in mathematics and a research associate in geophysics, was the first to apply the methods of digital signal processing to the seismic records used in oil exploration. He used the Whirlwind digital computer at MIT and the Ferranti digital computer at the University of Toronto. His PhD thesis introduced the digital concept of deconvolution, which was successful in opening up every area of the world to oil exploration. The deconvolution process removed the unwanted reverberations that obscured the desired primary reflections. Robinson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States and a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. In 2001, Robinson received the Maurice Ewing Gold Medal from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists with the citation, "For a lifetime of remarkable achievements that began while he was in MIT graduate school, when he in essence invented the field of digital seismic data processing. The progress in our science over the last 50 years in large part has evolved from the work of Enders Robinson." In 2003, the European Academy of Sciences awarded Robinson the Blaise Pascal Medal for Science and Technology as "the father of digital geophysics." In 2005, the International Astronomical Union, which acts as the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies, named the asteroid Svenders with the citation, "In 1952 Enders Robinson became the first ever to perform signal processing on a digital computer." In 2010, the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers awarded the Desiderius Erasmus Award to Robinson with the citation, "His early research laid the groundwork for seismic deconvolution and the widespread use of geophysical digital filters in general. Universally recognized as an eminent scientist, Dr. Robinson has aptly been described as one of the living legends of exploration geophysics."