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It is obvious to anyone reading about the Salem Witch Trials that something went terribly wrong in Salem Village in 1692. As a result of this wrong, nineteen people died. Many people have looked back on this incident as a horrendous event in which innocent people lives were taken away by the governing powers of the time. Today, the web offers a place where people can express their frustration, compassion and remorse for those wrongly accused and executed.
The sites examined in our class portray different ways of memorializing the victims of the Salem Witch Trials. Some sites are dedicated to one woman, such Susana Martin or Rebecca Nurse. These sites outline the victm's life history and explain their involvement in the trails. Telling the individual's story is way to consecrate their lives that were so unjustly taken away. By documenting the whole story of one of the nineteen, those reading the site may better understand that these were not just nineteen puritans. These were in fact nineteen real people with lives and families.
Other sites are more general and cover a larger scope of the trials. Many have a brief history of the trials and a list of all those killed at the end. By putting it at the end, one reads the events that took place and is then confronted with a long list of all those who died. This creates an effective way to remind people that the events in Salem were not just a story. They were a series of horrific events which resulted in the deaths of nineteen innocent people. The most effective and moving memorial site is based on pictures of gravestones, not so much on the historical writings about the people of Salem in 1692. By reading the names of the innocently executed carved into stone, one sees that these names will be forever registered in American History. By putting them up on the web the author intended to show, to those people who could not go to Salem themselves to see the gravestones, that the names of the victims and the events of the trials are permanently engraved in the minds of many Americans.
In one site the events in Salem are called one of the "mistakes" in American History. The web allows people to express their respect and remorse to those living relatives of the accused and those killed in 1692, and in doing so offer a public way for Americans to deal with some of the darker aspects of their past.
