Overview

Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories-stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement. In The Earthquake Observers, Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century's most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1930s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties. The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

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The disastrous tsunamis and earthquakes of recent years have painfully revealed the shortcomings of seismology as a predictive science. We might be tempted, then, to dream about a high-tech world of seismic laboratories that save us from future cataclysm. But Deborah R. Coen's compelling story reveals that such dreams, which have their roots in the nineteenth century, are perhaps misguided. She reveals a lost world of everyday earthquake observation in which expert and citizen, scientist and layperson, were bound together by the ties of mutual effort and responsibility. Today, seismologists and the rest of us might want to consider what has been sacrificed. This is not merely a book about the past; it prompts the question: how will society cope with the inevitable natural disasters of the future? Coen's finely woven story reveals that there have been, and could be, entirely different ways of studying and coping with earthquakes than those we have become accustomed to imagining. --Andre Wakefield, Pitzer College

"""The cleverly ambiguous title of this book plays with the many uncertainties that surround our experience of earthquakes. Just who are these 'observers': are they scientists, farmers, or city dwellers? In answering this question, Coen offers a wealth of information in a book that reads with the appeal of fiction."" (Times Higher Education)"""

Author Information

Deborah R. Coen is associate professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainly: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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