Despite these events, Salem developed into a major fishing, building, and maritime trade center during the eighteenth century. Reno Metro Map Its commercial successes and population growth thrust Salem into the spotlight during the Revolutionary period. In 1774, a provincial congress was organized in the town, and two months before the hostilities at Lexington and Concord, skirmishes between Countrys and British soldiers broke out on Salem’s streets. During the war, Salem’s fleet captured or sunk over 450 British vessels. When the United States was finally organized after the Revolution, Salem was the sixth-largest city in the new country.
Aaron F. Christensen See also: Massachusetts; Puritanism; Trade; Witchcraft and Witch Trials; Documents: The Salem Witch Trial of Susanna Martin (1692); Thomas Brattle on the Salem Trials (1692); A Poem Recalling the Hanging of a Relative due to the Salem Witch Trials (in 1692; pub. 1857). Bibliography Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and Culture in Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little Brown, 1958.
