Learning from the past is probably the best historical practice. Turning revisited knowledge into a kind of darkened renaissance faire as a continuing business venture is a suspicious behavior except probably in the USA since obtaining wealth via any means is a kind of national religion.

IMO, most human conflict on this earth can be traced back to troubled populations and their civilized resource situations. When wars of resources, religions, genocides, or any human tribe vs. tribe, city vs. city, nation vs. nation the culprit to me are the human group's perception of resource threats, (many times pumped up by unwise leadership). Leadership will call out pagans, thieves and other appointed scum of the earth types, still to me, wars big and small are resource grabs, whatever the stated reasons, including nation-states that as a general practice demonize external (border) populations as reasons for bad times which then fostering eventual conflicts.

I’m guessing back in the days of old Salem that when the lifestyle was not as rosy as being able to go down to the local Walmart to solve a problem, that local leadership stepped in to blame others for problems, like second class citizens such as women, or externals like Native Americans, even demons controlling the weather. This is a classic human on human conflict solution over resource fear.