The Once & Future Witch Hunt: A Descendant’s Reckoning from Salem to the Present

Past and present collide in this page-turner investigation into Salem’s irrepressible question: How could this have happened?

In 1692, Martha Allen Carrier was hanged in the Salem witch trials as the ＂Queen of Hell.＂ Three hundred years later, her nine-times-great-granddaughter, Alice Markham-Cantor, set out to discover why Martha had died. As she chased her ancestor through the archives, graveyards, and haunted places of New England, grappling with what we owe the past, Alice discovered a shocking truth: witch hunts didn’t end in Salem.

Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, The Once & Future Witch Hunt does not treat Salem as a cautionary tale. It treats Salem as an instruction manual--not on how to perform witch hunts, but how to stop them.

Foreword by Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author.

Afterword by Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch.

Alice Markham-Cantor is a fact-checker for New York Magazine. She serves on the working committee of the International Network Against Accusations of Witch Hunting and Associated Harms. Alice also spoke at the first Witch Memory Conference hosted by Silvia Federici. Her work has been published in The Nation, The Appeal, Scientific American, and TheHuffington Post. Alice is the recipient of Wesleyan University’s Connelly Prize for non-fiction, was the sole student honoree of the New York City Literary Honors in 2013, and she was writer and co-producer of A Witch Story, a documentary about Salem and her research. Learn more at AWitchStory.com.

Rebecca Traister is an American author and journalist. Traister is a writer-at-large for New York magazine and its website The Cut, and she is a contributing editor at Elle magazine. Traister is the author of New York Times bestseller Good and Mad. Visit her at RebeccaTraister.com.

Silvia Federici is a New York-based scholar, teacher, and feminist who wrote Caliban and the Witch. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria.