The Departments of History and Geosciences and the Humanities Center

Stony Brook University

Present

Conevery Bolton-Valencius

Department of History, University of Massachusetts Boston

Vernacular Science of the New Madrid Earthquakes:

Creating Knowledge in the Early United States

In the winter of 1811-12, a series of sizable tremors rippled out from the middle Mississippi Valley.  What we now term the New Madrid earthquakes were of immediate and pressing concern to the North Americans displaced, shaken, or frightened by them.  This presentation, from a forthcoming book on changing historical understandings of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, argues that the intense public interest and discussion surrounding the New Madrid earthquakes reveals a multi-faceted world of vernacular science in the early United States.

During the long sequence of earthquakes and in the months, years, and decades after, observers took weather measurements; recorded the effects of the shocks on their homes, livestock, and their own bodies; created devices for revealing the intensity and direction of the shocks; and investigated a multitude of effects from fouled wells to strange mineral deposits.  They reported Native American accounts from near the epicenters and from further west.  In ways both idiosyncratic and creative, early Americans attempted to convey and come to terms with these sudden and disruptive temblors. Accounts of the quakes demonstrate the blurred nature 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.  Their attempts to record and explain events that overwhelmed them reveal a broadly-shared and vigorous culture of science in the early United States.

This earlier history also highlights the surprising forgetting of the quakes in the late nineteenth century, a forgetting that took place for social and environmental as well as scientific reasons.  The New Madrid quakes represent an event once taken for granted that receded almost into tall tale for the better part of a century.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

1 p.m. Humanities 1008

Dangerous Trade

Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World

edited by Christopher Sellers and Joseph Melling

Is now out from Temple University Press, December 2011.

Based on a December 2007 conference at Stony Brook University.  Follow the further discussion on our Facebook page:

From anthrax to asbestos to pesticides, industrial toxins and pollutants have troubled the world for the past century and longer. Environmental hazards from industry remain one of the world’s foremost killers. Dangerous Trade establishes historical groundwork for a better understanding of how and why these hazards continue to threaten our shrinking world.

In this timely collection, an international group of scholars casts a rigorous eye towards efforts to combat these ailments. Dangerous Trade contains a wide range of case studies that illuminate transnational movements of risk—from the colonial plantations of Indonesia to compensation laws in late 19th century Britain, and from the occupational medicine clinics of 1960s New York City to the burning of electronic waste in early twenty-first century Uruguay.

The essays in Dangerous Trade provide an unprecedented broad perspective of the dangers stirred up by industrial activity across the globe, as well as the voices rasied to remedy them.

Introduction

How to Order

Environment, Medicine, Techno-Science

Crosby, Alfred. Ecological imperialism : the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Drayton, Richard. Nature’s government : science, imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Haraway, Donna. Primate visions : gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Harding, Sandra. The science question in feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Kuhn, Thomas. The structure of scientific revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Latour, Bruno. Laboratory life : the construction of scientific facts. 2nd ed. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton, 2000.

Mitman, Greg. Ecology, community, and American social thought, 1900-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Reverby, Susan. Examining Tuskegee : the infamous syphilis study and its legacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the air-pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

White, Richard. The Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl : the southern plains in the 1930s. 25th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

A Continuing Series on Environmental Studies and History Presents:

A talk by Professor Andrew Hurley
University of Missouri, St. Louis

Interpreting History in 3D:Applications of the Virtual City
in Communities, Classrooms, and Scholarship

Professor Hurley, a leading environmental and cultural historian, will speak about his and colleagues’ creation of the Virtual City, a “simulated world of downtown St. Louis from 1850 to 1950,” with many uses.  Hurley is the author of Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (1995); Chasing the American Dream: A History of Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks (2001); and Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner-Cities (2010).

Monday, October 31, 2011
11:45 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
1008 Humanities Building (in the Humanities Institute)

We are very proud to announce that Nancy Tomes, history of medicine, women and gender studies and US cultural history, is the winner of the 2011 Arthur J. Viseltear Award, presented by the American Public Health Association’s (APHA) Medical Care section. The honor is given annually to a historian who has made outstanding contributions to the study of the history of public health.  APHA recognizes several individuals for their exemplary professionalism, dedication and contributions to the field of public health. Prof. Tomes will be presented with this prestigious award at the 139th APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition in October, in Washington, D.C. with this year’s theme of “Healthy Communities Promote Healthy Minds and Bodies”.  Congratulations and well deserved!!

As a research project for my history of industrial hazards class (History 414), students created wikis on the history of some of Long Island’s hazardous waste sites, regulated under the EPA’s Superfund site.  We’ve now converted the results into publicly available websites.  Check it out if you are interested….

Overview

Suffolk County: Farmingdale area, Holbrook area,  Port Jefferson/Upton area

Nassau County: Farmingdale area, Hicksville area

Check out the following coverage of a joint effort by Stony Brook faculty and leaders and residents of the small suburban town of Port Jefferson, NY, to “Green Port Jefferson.” Page 12 details an effort to study Port Jefferson’s carbon footprint, led by Chris Sellers of the History Department, and Jessica Gurevitch, of the Department of Ecology and Evolution.

Please feel free to visit the website for the conference I recently convened at Stony Brook, along with University of Exeter’s Joseph Melling, December 13-15, 2008, on “Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World.”

Among the results of the conference are a planned edited volume, as well as a proposal for a Code of Sustainable Practice for Multinational Corporations, which appeared in the July 2008 International Journal for Occupational and Environmental Health.