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The last Salem "witch" has been cleared [1]
['Devin Nealy']
Date: 2022-08-04
The mercurial nature of human understanding makes history both a compelling and horrifying subject. When human ignorance is benign, it usually manifests in the form of silly beliefs, like flat Earth. Once an intellectual blindspot mutates into an unwavering and unassailable belief, ignorance can quickly become malevolent. That's when regimes and the mobs that follow them start punishing people, often violently, for stepping outside the societal convention and group think.
Few periods of history exemplify this phenomenon as potently as the Salem witch trials. Due to a gross misapprehension of science combined with inherent misogyny, several innocent women- and a few men- were wrongfully convicted and brutally murdered by unruly mobs of colonists.
Although most of the convictions associated with the Salem witch trial have been overturned, one woman, Elizabeth Johnson Jr, was never publically cleared. However, thanks to an eighth-grade civics class, Johnson's wrongful conviction of witchcraft was overturned last week. Those murderous colonists would've gotten away with destroying Johnson's legacy, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.
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