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A witch-hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. Practicing evil spells or incantations was proscribed and punishable in early human civilizations in the Middle East. In medieval Europe, witch-hunts often arose in connection to charges of heresy from Christianity.
Witch hunt, a series of investigations and persecutions of “witches” that occurred in Europe and the European colonies in the Americas between the 14th and 18th centuries. The term witch hunt has entered common political parlance to describe such campaigns as that of Sen. Joseph McCarthy to root
Witch-hunting in India is an ancient practice spanning back many centuries with references to dayans (witches) being found in several early Sanskrit works.
Sep 12, 2017 · Within a century, witch hunts were common and most of the accused were executed by burning at the stake or hanging. Single women, widows and other women on the margins of society were...
Jun 21, 2024 · Salem witch trials, (June 1692–May 1693), in American history, a series of investigations and persecutions that caused 19 convicted “witches” to be hanged and many other suspects to be imprisoned in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Danvers, Massachusetts).
Jun 23, 2018 · When someone cries “witch hunt,” Americans tend to think of 1690s Salem, Massachusetts. But, as sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda explains, the persecution of supposed witches had been going on for a long time before that across continental Europe , resulting in the execution of 25,000 to 60,000 people, most of them women, between the ...
May 13, 2023 · Witch hunting still exists in varying measures across nearly a dozen Indian states, mostly in Indigenous tribal areas in central and eastern parts of the country, experts say. Many states have...
Oct 30, 2015 · Modern-day witch hunts happen in Africa, the Pacific, Latin America and even in the U.S. and Europe, writes Mitch Horowitz for the New York Times.
Oct 24, 2022 · Fueled by xenophobia, religious extremism and long-brewing social tensions, the witch hunt continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later.
Many modern scholars argue that the witch hunts cannot be explained simplistically as an expression of male misogyny, as indeed women were frequently accused by other women, to the point that witch-hunts, at least at the local level of villages, have been described as having been driven primarily by "women's quarrels".
