Please join us this afternoon
STS Special Lecture
Vernacular Science in the Early U.S.:
Investigating the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12
Conevery Bolton Valencius
Harvard University
4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095
Abstract
In the winter of 1811 and 1812, a series of earthquakes shook the
middle Mississippi Valley like a bowl of jelly and reverberated
across eastern North America. As quakes far from a plate boundary,
the New Madrid earthquakes (named for the Missouri town near the
epicenters) are poorly explained by the plate tectonic model, and
their mechanisms are still little understood. These quakes were the
subject of intense inquiry in 19th-century popular media and in
seismology today.
This talk argues that early accounts of the quakes reveal in
American culture a lively and broadly-shared interest in
contributing to scientific explanations of the world. Reports about
the quakes demonstrate the fluidity of expert and nonexpert
discussions in the early nineteenth century. Because of the lack of
clear consensus about the mechanisms or causes of earthquakes,
people in borderland regions along the Ohio and Mississippi Valley
became not simply witnesses but theorists of the dramatic seismicity
they had experienced.
_______________________________________________
Sci-tech-public mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/sci-tech-public
