The picture above shows meta history– high school aged girls from the ’40s on a school trip in Salem, Massachusetts where countless innocent people were accused of witchcraft in the 1690s and executed. It’s funny how present everything seems to us, but in reality, history passes by us everyday. It was highly unlikely back then that any of these young women could have predicted how awestruck we would be looking at this picture today, how full of history it truly is and how much substance it holds. These girls were living in a time of great apprehension with World War II lurking just beyond them; the Salem Witch Trials were a period of fear and suppression. These time periods were three hundred years apart, yet the similarities are astounding. Their impact on American society has shaped the way we are today, not only as a country, but also as a people.

Vanessa Rodriguez, Section 1