Identify the basic forces at work during the Salem with hunt and explain how the episode affects our understanding of the colonial society in this period.

There were several witch hunts in colonial history, but the Salem witch hunt of 1692–1693 was the deadliest, leading to the executions of twenty people. As the blog from the state of Massachusetts (see the link below) explains, the witch hunt was a case of mass hysteria that shows the immense pressures that the colonists were under. Their charter to colonize Massachusetts had been revoked, and Charles II of England had issued a new charter in 1691 that made the Puritan colonists feel as though their control over their land and government was slipping. Over time, more and more colonists arrived in the colony who were not Puritans, and the Puritan colonists feared the loss of their power. They turned this fear against people in their community who were particularly vulnerable, including women, and the result was the mass hysteria of the witch trials. This episode shows that people in the colony were under immense pressure and were also still believers in superstition and witchcraft.

This is a complex topic, so I will try to condense the question down to the core issues.

It's easy to look at the Salem Witch Trials and characterize the colonies as a superstitious place driven by forces of paranoia and religious anxiety. However, it is important to consider the Witch Trials in their context. Only fifty years earlier, the political and social unrest of the English Civil War had led to the rise of the self-titled Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, who orchestrated the deaths of 300 women in a space of two years in East Anglia, England. In choosing to resolve questions of uncertainty and paranoia by resorting to accusations of witchcraft, the colony in Massachusetts was only behaving in keeping with its mother country. However, we can certainly assume that the isolated nature of the colony and its Puritanical religious beliefs helped to foster an atmosphere in which purity concerns and religious anxiety flourished. Small colonies in which everyone believed, as the Puritans taught, that conflict and argument were the work of the Devil presented a ripe landscape for the forces of paranoia and religious anxiety to flower.

Still, within the annals of persecution and witch-hunts, the Salem trials stand out as a statistically significant example, and generations of scholars have questioned what caused them. Key forces driving the witch hunt are generally held to be paranoia and, arguably, mass hysteria. Many also question why the young women first charged, Tituba, Sarah Goode, and Sarah Osborne, confessed to witchcraft to begin with. This is usually ascribed to an overzealous prosecutor and an unjust system that demonized women; while some men were prosecuted for witchcraft, the overwhelming majority of victims were innocent women who were determined to be in league with the Devil. But why did Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams accuse members of the community of witchcraft in the first place? The fact that many of the accusers seemed to experience hallucinations and out-of-body experiences seems to corroborate the suggestion that a form of mass hysteria was at work, encouraged by the isolated nature of the society and the intense religious belief within it.

The hysteria which ran rife in Salem in this period represents anxieties that manifested all over the colonies and should remind us that they were, at that time, on the furthest edge of what constituted the settled world (as far as Westerners were concerned). To live in the colonies was to live in a constant state of anxiety about what was around you and what was yet to be discovered. The combination of this constant root anxiety with the atmosphere of intense religious fervor generated by Puritanism led to the paranoia and mass hysteria which drove the Salem Witch Trials, which were, after the fact, condemned as unnecessary and inappropriately conducted.