Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock (review)

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Reviewed by:

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

Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America
jonathan todd hancock
University of North Carolina Press, 2021
186 pp.

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...