Emily Masters Truth and Deception 2025

          What’s the difference between a prostitute and an adult woman pursuing consensual sex with romantic partners? According to the Progressive Era’s social reformers, the difference is negligible. Between sensationalized stories by muckraking journalists and the fact that urbanization left Americans primed to embrace the idea of evils lurking in every city street, ‘white slavery’ rapidly took hold as a major fear of the early twentieth century.            Infantilizing treatment of sex workers was not only demeaning to the intelligence of adult women, but it also contributed to the narrative that women needed to be denied agency for their own protection. Because sex workers refused to be the perfect victim, would-be reformers changed the narrative. Women weren’t choosing to work as prostitutes because they’d weighed their options and made an informed decision with the limited choices available to them. No, that could...

A new century can be interpreted in many ways. Some see it as hurtling toward the future, while others see a blank slate or a sprawling expanse of opportunity. Others, apparently, see the end of times looming ever closer.  Such was the case with the Millerite Movement, a sweeping cultural phenomenon that originated amidst the Second Great Awakening. Historians have discussed what happened with the Millerites – from abandoning their livelihoods to the Great Disappointment that followed – in detail, but the driving forces behind the movement are much less obvious.   I posit that the new century created a sense of heretofore-unexperienced urgency for Americans in their young nation. American national identity was at the forefront of many of the greatest changes of the 1800s. Urbanization allowed unprecedented freedoms for previously-marginalized groups, immigration led to the imagery of the ‘melting pot’, and industrialization created both a wealth of economic opportunities ...

            One thing I’ve noticed in our studies of the Salem Witch Trials, and all witch hunts to an extent, is that the human element is often lost.            I posit that part of the reason is because it’s easy to get caught up in the psychology of wondering why people would behave ‘like that’, or to reflect with our modern awareness of science on how unrealistic their ideals of witchcraft are. It’s also easy to lump the victims together as just ‘victims’, particularly when thinking about the inherent injustice of the court case from a legal standpoint. Anger on account of the idea of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ is also a common reaction, just as we with our modern view of a good court system default to disgust at the lengths Salem’s legal system went to in order to acquire confessions.            Shown by how ghost stories and true crime media are growing in popularity by th...

I find myself drawing a connection between the Salem witch trials entering dreams into evidence as valid testimony, and the increasing prevalence of deepfakes. Both involve the possible defamation of one’s character as a result of their likeness in a situation without their involvement or consent. One was due to the hysteria of witchcraft, and the other is a modern phenomenon due to technology that has advanced faster than the laws that regulate it. Both say troubling things about justice, innocence, guilt, and the ability to prove any of those things one way or the other.  An interesting similarity between witchcraft allegations and deepfakes is that the victims of both are likely to experience a strong sensation of helplessness. Someone who is not a witch – as was the case for all those accused in Massachusetts – has little recourse against their community vilifying them as a practitioner of the dark arts. Likewise, someone whose video likeness is stolen and misused – or, in ...