[Sci-tech-public] STS Special Lecture by Conevery Bolton Valencius, February 5, 4:00 pm

[Debbie Meinbresse]

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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