[4] At the American Antiquarian Society, he was a Daniels Fellow in 1978-1979, supervising innovative research projects by Five College undergraduate students, one of which culminated in an exhibition of book illustrations by F. O. C. Darley at the AAS.
[9] In 1991-1992, he was granted an American Antiquarian Society-National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship [10] to pursue research on the history of Christmas in New England in relation to popular culture and the printed word.
In this capacity, he gave a lecture, "Sexual Prudery and Radicalism in the Nineteenth-Century America," on March 31, 1999, for the American Literature Department at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland,[12] and the W. E. B.
The book was received well, lauded as a "first-rate discussion of factionalism in a seventeenth-century New England town" by T. H. Breen, but with reservations about whether the two had established a direct relationship between economic factors and the witchcraft accusations, and asking whether that was even possible.
",[19] repeating her praise in 2008 when she wrote that the book "profoundly shap[ed] the way other historians, students, and general readers have understood the causes of the 1692 witch trials.
"[22] Following the publication of Salem Possessed, the two historians decided to compile and publish transcriptions of even more primary source documents that had proven to be so valuable to them and to their students.
Published in 1978 in three volumes, The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692 included transcriptions of the legal papers that had been done by a WPA team headed by Archie N. Frost in 1938, which had only been available to scholars in typescript form on deposit with the Essex Institute and with the Essex County Clerk of the Courts.