John Putnam Demos is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 and historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

. He has written two books which discuss witch-hunts and has discovered that one of his own ancestors was John Putnam Senior, ancestor of the Putnam family which was prominent in the Salem witch trials

Salem witch trials

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before county court trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693...

.

Demos was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize

Bancroft Prize

The Bancroft Prize is awarded each year by the trustees of Columbia University for books about diplomacy or the history of the Americas. It was established in 1948 by a bequest from Frederic Bancroft...

 for his book Entertaining Satan.

He retired in December 2008 as the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, USA.

Demos lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts

Tyringham, Massachusetts

Tyringham is a town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 327 at the 2010 census.- History :...

 and is currently working on a new book.

Works

• Entertaining Satan - Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, Oxford University Press, London, 1982 ISBN 0-19-503378-7
• A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony
• The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Award
  Ray Allen Billington Award
  The Ray Allen Billington Prize is given biennially by the Organization of American Historians for the best book about American frontier history. The "American frontier" includes all of North America, all post-1492 pioneer experiences, and comparisons between these frontier experiences and others...
  
  )
• The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World
• Editor, Remarkable Providences