Betty+Parris

Amy Eckstein October 21, 2010 Mrs. Chappell American Literature Block 3.

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Elizabeth (Betty) Parris was nine years old when the Salem Witchcraft trials happened; she basically was part of the beginning of the whole thing. She was a very sweet girl, daughter of a preacher Samuel Parris. Elizabeth had a hard time following the beliefs that her father preached to her. They lived in a time period where everyone did as they were told no talking back, anything of that sort. In the winter of 1691, Betty Parris and her older cousin Abigail Williams began to play with fortune telling and using a thing called a “Venus glass”. A “Venus glass” is a glass cup type thing that has an egg white suspended in water and it lets you see shapes and figures. The girls usually just focused on wanting to see their social status and which trade their future husbands would be having. This “Venus glass” was kept a secret from parents and only shared with the other girls in the area. On one session the glass showed a coffin that had Rev. John Hale in a modest inquiry with the nature of witchcraft in 1702. This led to something bad. After this is when the Salem witchcraft dilemma began The young girls that wanted what was in the glass were taking things too seriously. They started acting odd and having fun. Fun was not allowed in Salem Village. The Rev. was worried and searched for help. They were thinking it was witchcraft, the young girls started to accuse people of; witchcraft because they didn’t want to get in trouble for the foolishness they were having. When getting accused the judges put people to jail, to be hung, one man even got flattened to death. A lot of men and women had their innocent lives taken from them because of young girls' foolishness. I got all of my information from the link above. A college student wrote the essay. In her essay she has six resources that she used to write her essay therefore I know it's all true. Citation : “ Walsh, Sarah-Nell. "Salem Witch Trials Important Persons." //Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities//. Web. 21 Oct. 2010. . “

The information in this essay is all about Elizabeth ( Betty) Parris. This essay is written by a college student from Virginia University. She used a lot of sourses to do this essay on Betty Parris. There was a lot of information to grasp with this one subject and she seemed to have grasped it all. The article had most of all the details on what the start of the whole Salem witch trials were. This is a large topic to write about so I don't have all the details I would want.
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