On November 1, 1755--All Saints' Day--a massive earthquake
struck Europe's Iberian Peninsula and destroyed the city of Lisbon.
Churches collapsed upon thousands of worshippers celebrating the
holy day. "Earthquakes in Human History" tells the story of that
calamity and other epic earthquakes. The authors, Jelle Zeilinga de
Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, recapture the power of their
previous book, "Volcanoes in Human History." They vividly explain
the geological processes responsible for earthquakes, and they
describe how these events have had long-lasting aftereffects on
human societies and cultures. Their accounts are enlivened with
quotations from contemporary literature and from later reports.
In the chaos following the Lisbon quake, government and church
leaders vied for control. The Marques de Pombal rose to power and
became a virtual dictator. As a result, the Roman Catholic Jesuit
Order lost much of its influence in Portugal. Voltaire wrote his
satirical work "Candide" to refute the philosophy of "optimism,"
the belief that God had created a perfect world. And the 1755
earthquake sparked the search for a scientific understanding of
natural disasters.
Ranging from an examination of temblors mentioned in the Bible,
to a richly detailed account of the 1906 catastrophe in San
Francisco, to Japan's Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, to the
Peruvian earthquake in 1970 (the Western Hemisphere's greatest
natural disaster), this book is an unequaled testament to a natural
phenomenon that can be not only terrifying but also threatening to
humankind's fragile existence, always at risk because of
destructive powers beyond our control."
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