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The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes

Amazon.com Price:  $39.00 (as of 06/05/2019 17:18 PST- Details)

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Description

From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the glide of the continent’s mightiest river. For decades, people perplexed over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to get well from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten.
           
In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events which were long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were if truth be told enormously important at the time of their occurrence, and continue to have an effect on us today. Valencius weaves together scientific and historical evidence to demonstrate the vast role the New Madrid earthquakes played in the USA in the early nineteenth century, shaping the settlement patterns of early western Cherokees and other Indians, heightening the credibility of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa for their Indian League in the War of 1812, giving force to frontier religious revival, and spreading scientific inquiry. Moving into the present, Valencius explores the intertwined reasons—environmental, scientific, social, and economic—why something as consequential as major earthquakes may also be lost from public knowledge, offering a cautionary tale in a world struggling to respond to global climate change amid widespread willful denial.     
           
Engagingly written and ambitiously researched—both in the scientific literature and the writings of the time—The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes will be crucial resource in environmental history, geology, and seismology, in addition to history of science and medicine and early American and Native American history.


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