The Earthquake America Forgot

Scientifically and historically describes the New Madrid, Missouri earthquakes of 1811-1812 and provides valuable information in the event of an earthquake today.

Scientifically and historically describes the New Madrid, Missouri earthquakes of 1811-1812 and provides valuable information in the event of an earthquake today.

150 original photos, figures & tables on the New Madrid Seismic Zone of faults, fissures, & scars in the landscape still visible from the great earthquakes of 1811-12 and how they still affect you today.

In his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain personified the river as “Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!” Twain’s time as a steamboat pilot showed him the true character of The Great River, with its unpredictable moods and hidden secrets. Still a vital route for U.S. shipping, the Mississippi River has given life to riverside communities, manufacturing industries, fishing, tourism, and other livelihoods. But the Mighty Mississippi has also claimed countless lives as tribute to its muddy waters. Climate and environmental conditions made the Mississippi the perfect incubator for diseases like malaria. Natural disasters, like tornadoes, floods, and even an earthquake, have changed and reshaped the river’s banks over thousands of years. Shipwrecks and steamboat explosions were once common in the difficult-to-navigate waters. But when there was money to be made, there were some willing to risk it all—from the brave steamboat captains who went down with their ships, to the illegal moonshiners and pirates who pillaged the river’s bounty. In this book, author and Mississippi River historian Dean Klinkenberg explores the many disastrous events to have occurred on and along the river in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from steamboat explosions, to Yellow Fever epidemics, floods, and Prohibition piracy. Enjoy this journey into the darkest deeds of the Mississippi River.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, prairie fires, lightning, and droughts tested the mettle of both native and newcomer. This is the story of man’s encounters with Mother Nature on America’s prairies and plains during nineteenth-century westward expansion and settlement.

 As the 20th century began, swamps with immense timber resources covered much of the Missouri Bootheel. After investors harvested the timber, the landscape became overgrown. The conversion of swampland to farmland began with small drainage projects but complete reclamation was made possible by a system of ditches dug by the Little River Drainage District—the largest in the U.S., excavating more earth than for the Panama Canal. Farming quickly took over. The devastation of Southern cotton fields by boll weevils in the early 1920s brought to the cooler Bootheel an influx of black and white sharecroppers and cotton became the principal crop. Conflict over New Deal subsidies to increase cotton prices by reducing production led to the 1939 Sharecropper Demonstration, foreshadowing civil rights protests three decades later.

Turn on the news and it looks as if we live in a time and place unusually consumed by the specter of disaster. The events of 9/11 and the promise of future attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, and the inevitable consequences of environmental devastation all contribute to an atmosphere of imminent doom. But reading an account of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, with its vivid evocation of buildings “crumbling as one might crush a biscuit,” we see that calamities—whether natural or man-made—have long had an impact on the American consciousness. Uncovering the history of Americans’ responses to disaster from their colonial past up to the present, Kevin Rozario reveals the vital role that calamity—and our abiding fascination with it—has played in the development of this nation. Beginning with the Puritan view of disaster as God’s instrument of correction, Rozario explores how catastrophic events frequently inspired positive reactions. He argues that they have shaped American life by providing an opportunity to take stock of our values and social institutions. Destruction leads naturally to rebuilding, and here we learn that disasters have been a boon to capitalism, and, paradoxically, indispensable to the construction of dominant American ideas of progress. As Rozario turns to the present, he finds that the impulse to respond creatively to disasters is mitigated by a mania for security. Terror alerts and duct tape represent the cynical politician’s attitude about 9/11, but Rozario focuses on how the attacks registered in the popular imagination—how responses to genuine calamity were mediated by the hyperreal thrills of movies; how apocalyptic literature, like the best-selling Left Behind series, recycles Puritan religious outlooks while adopting Hollywood’s style; and how the convergence of these two ways of imagining disaster points to a new postmodern culture of calamity. The Culture of Calamity will stand as the definitive diagnosis of the peculiarly American addiction to the spectacle of destruction.

The Desloge family in America is known as a great industrialist, philanthropic, religious and naturalist family spanning 200 years in America and is one of the oldest French families in Missouri and St. Louis. It has taken the vital force and verve of great families to build great business in America; and build a country of increasing middle-class consumers as well. Tycoons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Gould and Morgan - greats of the gilded age have made a real impression on industry and the increase in the human condition from those industries. Other families have made their mark in much the same way - such as Kellogg and Wrigley. Steel, railroads, finance, cereal, chewing gum. In lead, the name is Desloge. Starting with entrepreneurial zeal by wildcatting in mining in Missouri and also in the California Gold Rush, among these famous names, the Desloge family became - and today represents - industrial and social titans in Missouri and American history.