Paul S. Boyer | Studied A-bomb, witches

Paul S. Boyer, 78, an intellectual historian who wrote groundbreaking studies of the Salem witch trials, the history of apocalyptic movements, and the response of the U.S. public to the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, died of cancer March 17 in Madison, Wis.

Boyer, a professor of U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin from 1980 until his retirement in 2002, was known for his research on the religious underpinnings of American culture, and especially for his interest in how Americans respond to perceived existential threats.

He first received wide notice in 1974 with Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, which suggested that social envy motivated many of the accusers in the 17th-century witch trials.

Boyer, a lifelong pacifist raised in the Brethren in Christ Church, an offshoot of the Mennonites, was probably best known for two books about the long-term cultural impact of the United States' decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, at the end of World War II.