The following is a guest blog post by Jonathan Todd Hancock, author of Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. Through varied peoples' efforts to come to grips with the New Madrid earthquakes, Hancock reframes early nineteenth-century North America as a site where all of its inhabitants wrestled with fundamental human questions amid prophecies, political reinventions, and war. Because of their tremendous strength and geographical scope, there are references to the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12 in archives throughout the United States. Road trips have taken me across the Midwest and Deep South,...