Robin DeRosa, professor of English

DeRosa first conceived of this book during a visit to Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum that reenacts the 1627 Pilgrim settlement in Massachusetts. “I was so interested in how the present and past worlds collided, and how the site worked so hard to debunk misconceptions about the Pilgrims, even as it catered to a modern tourist crowd with all of their demands and tastes,” she says. “The book is partially about the 1692 witch trials, but it’s also about how we rewrite the past and how we make myths and ‘facts’ out of the shards of sources that we have to work with.”

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