Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. By Jonathan Todd Hancock

Abstract

“All nature was in a state of dissolution,” remarked a shocked Scottish naturalist as he witnessed the first of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 from aboard a vessel bobbing precariously on the Mississippi River (p. 8). The tremblors, which may have reached 7.0 on the modern Richter scale, radiated thousands of miles from the epicenter in the Missouri Bootheel and triggered widespread destruction throughout the Mississippi Valley. They rank among the most devasting natural disasters in North American history, and they coincided with crucial religious and political events in the heart of the continent. Deeply researched, deftly written, and briskly argued, Jonathan Hancock’s Convulsive States situates the New Madrid earthquakes within emerging nineteenth-century debates about the “place of religious authority in nation-states” (p. 2). Hancock covers an impressive breadth of terrain in this brief monograph. The book’s five thematic chapters move from experiences and interpretations of the 1811 earthquakes...