Salem is a coastal city that, before European colonisation, was lived in for thousands of years by American Indians and was part of a peninsula known as Naumkeag.

Due to war, contact with settlers and a smallpox epidemic, many Naumkeag people passed away in the early seventeenth century.

English settlers arrived and founded Salem in 1626.

Salem has since become immortalised as the site of its namesake witch trials, which happened in 1692 and 1693, when over 200 people were accused of practising witchcraft.