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<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><b>Please join us this
afternoon<br>
</b> <br>
<div align="center"><font size=4><b><u>STS Special Lecture<br><br>
<br>
</u></font><font size=5 color="#0000FF">Vernacular Science in the Early
U.S.:<br>
Investigating the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12<br><br>
</font><font size=5>Conevery Bolton Valencius<br>
</font><font size=4>Harvard University<br><br>
4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095<br>
</font> <br><br>
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<u>Abstract<br>
</u></b>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.<br>
<br>
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. <br>
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