The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter

Coen, Deborah R.

ISBN 10: 022621205X / ISBN 13: 9780226212050

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2014

About this Item

Very Good - Crisp, clean, unread book with some shelfwear/edgewear, may have a remainder mark - NICE PAPERBACK Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M022621205XZ2

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022621205X
• ISBN 13: 9780226212050
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Deborah R. Coen is professor of history and the history of science and medicine at Yale University. She is the author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale; The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter; and Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life. She coedited Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate.