New York largely stayed out of the witch trial hysteria that plagued much of New England in the seventeenth century. But nearly two centuries later, New York City was engaged in a different kind of witch hunt: cracking down on the working-class women who earned their bread as fortune tellers on the Lower East Side. This movement was led in large part by the journalists who entertained their readers by seeking out these women’s services only to write mocking, derisive articles about their experience in the papers. In Mortimer and the Witches, a new nonfiction book that came out earlier this year, historian and NYC tour guide Marie Carter interweaves the biography of one such journalist with a study of the fortune tellers whose livelihoods he so reviled. Continue reading Review of Mortimer and the Witches—Niche New York History