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Members Making News

Mary Beth Norton, professor of history at Cornell University and AHA president-elect, was recently interviewed by The Atlantic about President Donald Trump’s use of the Salem witch trials as an analogy for current federal investigations. “To me what’s interesting about Trump’s tweet is the use of the witch-hunt analogy, because it’s a classic way in which somebody implicitly claims, ‘I am being unfairly targeted,’ because we all believe that the people who were accused of witchcraft in 1692 were unfairly targeted,” Norton said. “It’s not just that it’s a massive attack on him, it’s that it’s an unfair and false attack on him, which goes along with everything else he’s said.”