I've always wanted to know more about the Reconstruction era! It's kind of depressing, but also really fascinating. There's a manga I love called Pumpkin Scissors, not because it's overwhelmingly great but because it's one of the only long-form works of fiction I can think of where the plot is explicitly the problems of postwar recovery.
Schiff goes a little bit into the trauma too, from what we can tell from the historical record -- it's pretty clear even from the little written evidence we have that some of the people who got ground up in the Salem mill never recovered from the experience (I personally can't imagine ever wanting to go back to a church after living through that, and some people definitely were like "welp! no more Puritans for me ever, I'm an Anglican now! LATER, NIGHTMARES.") And it's worse when some of the people who accused each other were members of the same family, as they often were; how do you possibly deal with the fact that your seven-year-old was like "yeah, Mommy is FOR SURE a witch!"
no subject
Schiff goes a little bit into the trauma too, from what we can tell from the historical record -- it's pretty clear even from the little written evidence we have that some of the people who got ground up in the Salem mill never recovered from the experience (I personally can't imagine ever wanting to go back to a church after living through that, and some people definitely were like "welp! no more Puritans for me ever, I'm an Anglican now! LATER, NIGHTMARES.") And it's worse when some of the people who accused each other were members of the same family, as they often were; how do you possibly deal with the fact that your seven-year-old was like "yeah, Mommy is FOR SURE a witch!"