By Deborah Coen, Assistant Professor of History 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