Salem Witch Trials: Tituba in Two Centuries of Literature with Samaine Lockwood

Show Notes

What does American literature reveal about how a society imagines justice, belonging, and the power of women? Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor of English at George Mason University and the 2026 Fenwick Fellow, has spent years tracing that question through one of the most enduring stories in American culture: the Salem witch trials. Her fellowship project, Tituba Indian: The History of an American Cultural Figure follows Tituba Indian from the historical record of 1692 through two centuries of novels, plays, and reimaginings to ask what her story has been made to carry and why.

In This Episode

How the Salem witch trials became one of the most reimagined episodes in American literary history
Why Tituba Indian sits at the center of debates about race, gender, and civic belonging across two centuries of American culture
How culture reuses the past
How Ann Petry’s Tituba of Salem Village broke from literary tradition decades before most readers noticed
Why Arthur Miller’s The Crucible remains complicated and how teachers are beginning to challenge it in the classroom
The real significance of the witch as a figure in literature, from colonial revival to contemporary young adult fiction
Where to find the vast archive of Salem witch trial literature that predates copyright, freely available online

About Samaine Lockwood Samaine Lockwood is an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, specializing in 19th century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. She is the 2026 Fenwick Fellow, a research fellowship funded by the George Mason Fenwick Library supporting her book in progress, Tituba Indian and the History of an American Cultural Figure. Her previous book, Archives of Desire: the Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015.

Authors and Works Mentioned in This Episode

Ann Petry: Tituba of Salem Village; The Narrows; Biography of Harriet Tubman. First black woman to write a bestselling novel in the United States.
Maryse Conde: I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem
Henry William Herbert: The Fair Puritan (written 1850s, published 1870s)
Elizabeth Gaskell: Lois the Witch
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (with Grace Ellery Channing): Untitled Salem play, 1890, held at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Fiction writer, first Black woman editor of a magazine, key figure in the Boston African American community at the turn of the 20th century
Arthur Miller: The Crucible
Marian Starkey: The Devil in Massachusetts
Matilda Joslyn Gage: Woman, Church, and State (1890s)
Saidiya Hartman: Venus in Two Acts
Gretchen Adams: The Specter of Salem
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories
Kimberly Bellflower: John Proctor is the Villain (Broadway, 2024)
Samaine Lockwood: Archives of Desire: the Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism
Keith Clark: The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

Where to Find These Works Most works published before 1923 are in the public domain and freely available through Open Library and Internet Archive. For titles still in print, support this podcast and End Witch Hunts by purchasing through our Bookshop.org storefront: bookshop.org/shop/endwitchhunts

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