Earthquakes in Human History

[Dave Monroe]

de Boer, Jelle Zeilinga and Donald Theodore Sanders.
   Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching
   Effects of Seismic Disruption.  Princeton, NJ:
   Princeton UP, 2005.

On November 1, 1755-All Saints' Day-a massive
earthquake struck Europe's Iberian Peninsula and
destroyed the city of Lisbon. Churches collapsed upon
thousands of worshippers celebrating the holy day.
Earthquakes in Human History tells the story of that
calamity and other epic earthquakes. The authors,
Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders,
recapture the power of their previous book, Volcanoes
in Human History. They vividly explain the geological
processes responsible for earthquakes, and they
describe how these events have had long-lasting
aftereffects on human societies and cultures. Their
accounts are enlivened with quotations from
contemporary literature and from later reports.

In the chaos following the Lisbon quake, government
and church leaders vied for control. The Marquês de
Pombal rose to power and became a virtual dictator. As
a result, the Roman Catholic Jesuit Order lost much of
its influence in Portugal. Voltaire wrote his
satirical work Candide to refute the philosophy of
"optimism," the belief that God had created a perfect
world. And the 1755 earthquake sparked the search for
a scientific understanding of natural disasters.

Ranging from an examination of temblors mentioned in
the Bible, to a richly detailed account of the 1906
catastrophe in San Francisco, to Japan's Great Kanto
Earthquake of 1923, to the Peruvian earthquake in 1970
(the Western Hemisphere's greatest natural disaster),
this book is an unequaled testament to a natural
phenomenon that can be not only terrifying but also
threatening to humankind's fragile existence, always
at risk because of destructive powers beyond our
control.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7821.html

Chapter 1

EARTHQUAKES: ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES

    A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest
associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity,
has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a
fluid.
    --Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle 

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7821.html


		
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