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

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)

Check out the link to this video, prepared by the American Historical Association’s film-making team, on our graduate program here in the history department:

Preparing Historians for the Challenge of 21st Century Academia

Here are some pictures from the premiere showing of a video featuring our department’s graduate program, at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Diego, CA.   For those of you who couldn’t make it…

Spring 2010 Calendar

Stony Brook Faculty Workshop

Benedict Robinson (Thursday February 11, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of English)

“DISGUST, C. 1610, FARINGDON WARD WITHOUT.”

New Research in Historical Social Sciences

Pablo Piccato (Tuesday March 9, 12:50-2:10)

(Columbia University, History Department. Director of ILAS – Institute of Latin American Studies)

“MURDER AND POLITICS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY MEXICO”

New Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza (Wednesday April 14, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology)

“HUMAN HISTORY AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR – RICH NEW LESSONS FROM EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY”

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

This course will explore the history of work and environment during the modern era (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).  We will start with readings from “classic” texts and authors that have  set older and newer agendas for the fields of labor history (Marx, Fink, D. Montgomery) and environmental history (Marx, Worster, Cronon), centered, in contrasting ways, around the notion of “capitalist production.” For these as well as the newer works in both fields that comprise the bulk of our reading list, we will consider what authors may (or may not) have to say to one another about the sphere of production and its history.    Key areas of discussion will also include: the historical implications of recent debates over nature of “modern” and “postmodern” capitalism; comparison of the work and environmental history of “developed” versus “developing” worlds; and the transnational and/or global dimensions of workplace and environmental change. Focus will fall in particular on the new ways that historians are figuring space and geography into labor and business history, and work into environmental history.  While the reading list for much of the semester will be set in advance, readings and geographic coverage in many of the later sessions will hinge upon student preferences and needs.

Readings:

There are four books that everyone in the course will be required to read:

David Montgomery, Workers Control in America

William Cronon, Changes in the Land

Linda Nash, Inescapable Inequalities; A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge

Laura Raynolds, et al., Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas

In addition, everyone will be required to read one out of each of these two pairs of books:

(1) John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun or

Beverley Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870

(2) Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power and Injustice or

Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities

While we will bring many other readings to the table, most will be selected and presented by individuals within the class.

Click on the title of this entry to find links to those extra documents I promised for your suburban town histories.

Chris

Land Use Map, 1968

Land Use Map Key to Different Uses

Racial Composition and Total Population, 1960 and 1970

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 click here for this fall’s schedule of papers and speakers in this initiative. The series is a collaborative effort of the History and Sociology Departments at Stony Brook.