Shocks to the natural order: Euroamerican understandings of the New Madrid Earthquakes

My thesis uses firsthand accounts and early scholarly studies of the New Madrid Earthquakes to investigate the worldviews of a range of Euroamerican observers in the early nineteenth-century United States. Emanating from their epicenter on the Mississippi River in present-day southeastern Missouri, the earthquakes were great and sustained disruptions in nature that frightened and fascinated all sectors of the North American populace. Regardless of one's geographical or social location, observation and empiricism became the vehicles for negotiating the chaos in nature. The widespread Christian conversions in the western territories constituted one means of making sense of the disaster, but backcountry thinkers' observations and interpretations show that trans-Appalachian communities were not merely revivalistic release valves opposing the rationalism and faithful empiricism that early national elites embraced. Euroamericans instead drew from porous systems of scientific and religious knowledge and personal observations to construct their own empirical earthquake analyses.