On October 28, 2014, Time magazine published Jennifer Latson’s “Why Witches on TV Spell Trouble in Real Life,” a look at why the witch has become so commonplace in pop culture, as well as the long-standing morality lesson taught by studies of the historical witch-trials, which gave us the phraseContinue Reading
The topic of the European Witch-Craze, stretching roughly between the late 15th century and the mid-17th century, is a complex topic. It’s very easy to simply disregard it as barbaric and superstitious, and, indeed, academia did exactly that until the 1960s. That doesn’t mean you can’t find material about witchContinue Reading
As I’m cleaning up stuff from my time at About.com, I stumbled across this gem of a public comment on the Facebook group dedicated to my Alternative Religion about.com site, and I just had to save it for posterity. Forget the fact that this writer is clearly what I shallContinue Reading
This TV show makes the historian in me weep. To me, Sleepy Hollow typifies all the wrong ways of writing alt-history. The writers came up with a story by grabbing a literary figure, bringing him into the present, rolling both into the apocalyptic predictions of the Book of Revelation, andContinue Reading