Reviewed by:

• Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock
• Scott M. Larson (bio)

Beginning in December 1811, a series of powerful earthquakes shook New Madrid, Missouri. The tremblors were physically felt for hundreds of miles, and in Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America, Jonathan Todd Hancock aims to explore the wide-ranging impacts of these quakes among Native American societies and the young United States. Relatively few people died in the New Madrid earthquakes, particularly in comparison with the destruction of massive quakes that struck Lima, Peru, and Lisbon, Portugal in the eighteenth century, which themselves prompted extensive religious and natural scientific inquiries. The New Madrid quakes nevertheless threw the land and its inhabitants into turmoil. Since the earthquakes occurred alongside the Comet of 1811, the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811, and escalating United States military engagements with Native American and European powers, interpreters saw the 1811–12 tremblors as signs connected to national, moral, and political upheaval. Some considered them fulfillments of dire prophecies. Hancock explores the range of meanings that were ascribed to the earthquakes and "probes those meanings to provide a continental, cross-cultural perspective on prophecy and revivalism, state formations, and understandings of environmental change across Native American, African American, and Euro American societies in the early nineteenth century" (3).

Beyond the immediate events of the earthquakes, which occurred between December 1811 and February 1812 and consisted primarily of three powerful tremors estimated at 7.0 on the Richter scale, the book is divided thematically, tackling the different arenas in which the earthquakes were understood and its influences felt. Hancock organizes the book into sections on "knowledge," "spirit," "politics," and "territory," and within each of these chapters, Hancock gives attention to the conflicting and overlapping ways that a range of American actors engaged the earthquakes. This approach offers a diverse view of early American cultural responses to [End Page 192] the earthquakes. Hancock draws on a wide range of both published and unpublished primary sources, and he is careful to note that many of the primary accounts of the earthquakes were unreliable and that some were published for sensation rather than for veracity. Hancock also attends to ethical considerations of engaging Indigenous knowledge, reminding the reader that "medicine, as contemporary tribal communities refer to secret practices that are fundamental to spirituality, is a deeply sensitive topic that belongs to families and lineages of special practitioners, not curious outsiders" (4). While drawing attention to these boundaries, Hancock focuses much of the book on Native interpretations of the quakes, a strong contribution to historical studies of earthquakes and other natural disasters such as Deborah Coen's The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (U of Chicago P, 2012).

Indeed, some of the most significant contributions of the book come from its research into Native American perceptions of earthquakes broadly, which were sometimes conceptualized as parts of natural cycles, and sometimes understood as punishments or warnings for human behavior (38–39). Hancock interrogates how figures like Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa, along with his brother Tecumseh, used prophecy and meaning-making around the New Madrid earthquakes to build spiritual and military power. While other scholarly works, such as R. David Edmunds's The Shawnee Prophet (Nebraska UP, 1983) and Adam Jortner's The Gods of Prophetstown (Oxford UP, 2011), treat Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh as distinct, and sometimes even competing, figures, Hancock frames the two brothers together as a unit and movement that he calls the "Shawnee Brothers." Hancock argues that Tenskwatawa had prophesied the earthquake in 1808 and the prophecy's seeming fulfillment in 1811–12 may have lent credence to his call for intertribal military resistance to white settlement. He presented the phenomena as signs demanding purification from aspects of white culture—such as alcohol and European education, dress, and landholding—and the cessation of alliance with the United States or European nations. Despite Tenskwatawa's claims to prophetic and spiritual power and his influence over significant numbers of militant Native Americans in the Ohio region...

审阅者：

• 《惊厥国家：地震、预言和早期美国的重建》作者：乔纳森·托德·汉考克
• 斯科特·M·拉尔森（简介）

1811 年 12 月开始，密苏里州新马德里发生了一系列强烈地震。数百英里范围内都能感受到地震，乔纳森·托德·汉考克在《惊厥国家：地震、预言和早期美国的重建》中旨在探讨这些地震对美洲原住民社会和年轻美国的广泛影响。新马德里地震中的死亡人数相对较少，特别是与十八世纪秘鲁利马和葡萄牙里斯本发生的大地震相比，这些地震本身引发了广泛的宗教和自然科学调查。然而，新马德里地震使这片土地及其居民陷入混乱。由于这些地震与 1811 年彗星、1811 年里士满剧院火灾以及美国与美洲原住民和欧洲列强的军事接触不断升级同时发生，解释者将 1811-12 年的地震视为与国家、道德和政治动乱相关的迹象。有些人认为它们实现了可怕的预言。汉考克探索了地震的一系列含义，并“探讨这些含义，以提供关于预言和复兴主义、国家形成以及对美洲原住民、非裔美国人和欧美社会环境变化的理解的大陆、跨文化视角”十九世纪初期”(3)。

除了 1811 年 12 月至 1812 年 2 月期间发生的地震（主要由估计为里氏 7 级的三次强烈地震组成）的直接事件之外，本书还按主题进行了划分，讨论了了解地震及其影响的不同领域。毛毡。汉考克将这本书分为“知识”、“精神”、“政治”和“领土”几个部分，在每一章中，汉考克都关注了一系列美国行动者参与地震的相互冲突和重叠的方式。这种方法提供了美国早期文化对地震的反应的不同观点。 [第 192 页]汉考克广泛利用了已发表和未发表的主要资料，他小心翼翼地指出，许多关于地震的主要资料都是不可靠的，有些资料的发表是为了引起轰动，而不是为了真实性。汉考克还关注参与土著知识的伦理考虑，提醒读者“医学，作为当代部落社区指的是灵性基础的秘密实践，是一个非常敏感的话题，属于特殊从业者的家庭和血统，而不是好奇的局外人”（4）。在提请人们注意这些界限的同时，汉考克将书中的大部分内容集中在对地震的本土解释上，这对地震和其他自然灾害的历史研究做出了重大贡献，例如黛博拉·科恩的《地震观察者：从里斯本到里克特的灾难科学》（芝加哥大学） P，2012）。

事实上，这本书最重要的一些贡献来自于它对美洲原住民对地震的广泛看法的研究，这些看法有时被概念化为自然循环的一部分，有时被理解为对人类行为的惩罚或警告（38-39）。汉考克质疑肖尼族领袖滕斯克瓦塔瓦（Tenskwatawa）及其兄弟特库姆塞（Tecumseh）等人物如何利用围绕新马德里地震的预言和意义构建来建立精神和军事力量。虽然其他学术著作，例如 R. David Edmunds 的《肖尼先知》（内布拉斯加州大学出版社，1983 年）和 Adam Jortner 的《预言家之神》（牛津大学出版社，2011 年），将 Tenskwatawa 和 Tecumseh 视为截然不同的、有时甚至是相互竞争的人物，但汉考克框架两兄弟作为一个整体和运动团结在一起，他称之为“肖尼兄弟”。汉考克认为，坦斯克瓦塔瓦曾预言 1808 年的地震，而该预言在 1811-12 年的看似应验可能使他呼吁部落间军事抵抗白人定居点的呼吁更加可信。他将这些现象描述为要求从白人文化的各个方面（例如酒精和欧洲教育、着装和土地所有权）进行净化以及停止与美国或欧洲国家结盟的标志。尽管坦斯克瓦塔瓦声称拥有预言和精神力量，并且他对俄亥俄地区大量好战的美洲原住民产生了影响……