The Salem witch trials, a shameful episode in early New England history, provided a salient theme for several nineteenth-century American writers, including John Greenleaf Whittier and John William De Forest. Novelist and reformer John Neal (1793-1876) was an advocate of, among other causes, female suffrage and capital punishment reform. His novel, Rachel Dyer (1828) deals with the hysteria and scape-goating that surrounded the trials. Mixing drama with history, Neal exposes, through his protagonists, the still explosive issues of injustice and religious bigotry.