Starkey, Marion Lena (1901–) - U.S. History

Marion Lena Starkey was born on April 13, 1901, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Arthur E. Starkey, a painter and publisher, and Alice T. (Gray) Starkey. She received a B.S. from Boston University in 1922, an M.A. from Boston University in 1935, and did graduate study at Harvard in 1946. She was editor of the Saugus Herald in Saugus, Massachusetts, from 1924 to 1929, then became an associate professor of English at Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia, from 1930 to 1943. Her first book, The First Plantation: A History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Va., 1607–1887 , was privately printed. She entered the Women’s Army Corps in 1943 and remained until 1945 as translator and editor for the Office of Strategic Services in Algiers, Bari, Caserta, and Paris. She returned to the United States and became an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut, New London from 1946 to 1950 and the University of Connecticut, Hartford from 1950 to 1961 before becoming a full-time writer.

Marion Starkey wrote The Cherokee Nation in 1946; The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials in 1949; A Little Rebellion in 1955; Land Where Our Fathers Died: The Settling of the Eastern Shores, 1607–1735 in 1962; Striving To Make It My Home: The Story of Americans from Africa in 1964; The Congregational Way: The Role of the Pilgrims and Their Heirs In Shaping America in 1966; Lace Cuffs and Leather Aprons: Popular Struggles in the Federalist Era, 1738–1800 in 1972; The Visionary Girls: Witchcraft in Salem Village (juvenile) in 1973; and The Tall Man from Boston in 1975. It was said that in The Devil in Massachusetts she was the first historian to use the unpublished verbatim transcriptions of documents and papers on witchcraft in Salem.