Mary Beth Norton

And for the overachievers listening, the source also shouts out the next tier of reading.

If the top five just create an appetite for the actual history, you should look for Mary Beth Norton's In The Devil's Snare, which brilliantly argues that the trauma of the brutal Indian Wars on the main frontier fundamentally shaped the psychological crisis in Salem.

There's Emerson Baker's A Storm of Witchcraft for the deep political and socioeconomic angle, and Carol Carlson's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman for a landmark brilliant study on gender and inheritance laws.

And don't forget Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.

That's the hardcore that go off into exile.

I was listening to Ben Franklin's World the other day, listening to Mary Beth Norton, one of my favorites, and I think she would argue that the term loyalist starts to be heard more regularly in around 1774 as a term.

And of course, that's when you see escalation of grievances over the Intolerable or Coercive Acts as a response to the Boston Tea Party and all of that.

So I do recall her saying that 1774 was an important year in terms of the use of the term loyalist, and that before then we had used words like Tory or royalist or other kinds of words that kind of meant similar things, but not entirely.