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 flow of the continent's mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover 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 that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at the time of their occurrence, and continue to affect us today.
Conevery Bolton Valencius is associate professor in the Department of History and the School for the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land.
"Weaving deep time with human time, Valencius gives us exemplary science history: accurate yet erudite, entertaining but substantial, adroitly marshalling the past to interpret the present." (Nature)
