Flashback: Historians: Cold Weather Caused the Salem Witch Trials – People looked for scapegoats to blame crop failure on
The theory, first laid out by the economist Emily Oster in her senior thesis at Harvard University eight years ago, holds that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the “little ice age.”Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the […]