'Motherland' Season 2: Is 'Motherland: Fort Salem' Based on a True Story?

Motherland: Fort Salem season 2 begins tonight (June 22) on Freeform at 10 p.m. ET. The supernatural series stars Deadpool's Taylor Hickson, The Kissing Booth's Jessica Sutton, and newcomer Ashley Nicole Williams as three witches who fight in the U.S. Army. Newsweek has everything you need to know about the inspiration behind the series.

Is Motherland: Fort Salem based on a true story?

Motherland: Fort Salem follows the story of Raelle Collar (Hickson), Abigail Bellweather (Williams), and Tally Craven (Sutton), who are enlisted in the U.S. Army.

The trio use their supernatural powers and witchcraft to fight and are highly trained in "combat magic."

They also use their vocal cords to enact "seeds," which create powerful spells.

The series is entirely fictional but has its roots in one of the most infamous periods of U.S. legal history.

Motherland: Fort Salem is set in an alternate universe, where the U.S. signed the 'Salem Accord' after the end of the Salem witch trials.

In the series, the Salem Accord is a deal to end the persecution of witches. In exchange, witches were conscripted to fight in America's wars.

In the series, the Accord is at odds with a terrorist organization known as the Spree, a group of witches who are against the military conscription of witches.

Although the show is not based on a single true story and the Salem Accord is not a real document, the historical background the show is set against is very real.

The Salem Witch Trials

Motherland: Fort Salem poses the questions: What if the innocent women accused of witchcraft at the Salem witch trials were actually real witches, and what would have happened had they lived?

The Salem witch trials took place between February 1692 and May 1693 in Salem, Massachusetts, and saw over 200 people accused of witchcraft.

After a series of hearings and trials, 30 people were found guilty and 19 were executed by hanging.

Fourteen of those executed were women. The Salem witch trials quickly became the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America.

The trials began when young girls in Salem began accusing others of witchcraft.

The mass panic began after Betty Paris, age nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, were described as having fits "beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect" by John Hale, the minister of the nearby town of Beverly.

However, when they were examined by a doctor, there was no physical evidence of any health condition.

Soon after, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba were arrested for witchcraft. The trio were all stereotyped as witches: Good was unmarried, Osborne did not attend church and Tituba was a slave.

One month later, several others were accused of witchcraft.

Giles Corey, an 81-year-old farmer, refused to enter a guilty plea at his trial in September. He was later pressed to death.

The accused were found guilty using spectral evidence, false confessions, moles of blemishes on the body known as witch's teats, and pots of ointments in their homes.

There are many factors contributing to the beginning of the Salem witch trials, crossing political, religious, social class, and gender lines.

At the time, New England had recently been settled by the Puritans and had a highly fractious and religious population.

The Puritans opposed many traditions of the Church of England and had traveled to colonial North America to establish their own society, settling in the Massachusetts Bay.

Across early modern Europe and colonial North America, almost 80% of people accused of witchcraft were women.

Puritanism preached women were inherently sinful and more susceptible to damnation as they were weaker than men.

They also held the belief that men and women were not equal in the eyes of the Devil and were only equal in the eyes of God.

Speaking recently to Assignment X about the second series of Motherland: Fort Salem, creator Eliot Laurence teased: "I wanted to really create a storyline that raised the question of, "What is a witch?" So, in Season 2, there is this idea of the new witch [played by Mellany Barros], and soon enough, there are going to be testing centers, and some people don't want to relinquish their daughters, and soon enough, it becomes a matter of great and mounting national tension."

Motherland: Fort Salem season 2 premieres Tuesday, June 22 at 10 p.m. ET on Freeform