Please join us on Tuesday, February 5th:
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.
Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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