| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Carl-Henry Geschwind. California Earthquakes: Science, Risk and the Politics of Hazard Mitigation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 337. $45.00.

This book tells a tale about how a small group of seismic scientists and structural engineers labored over the twentieth century to develop a rigorous new science (seismology), while educating the public about geological hazards and convincing politicians about the benefits of state and federal emergency management systems. Over nine chronological chapters, Carl-Henry Geschwind argues that these "progressive" experts are primarily responsible for the "sophisticated" system of earthquake preparedness that now prevails in contemporary California. 1

It was not easy to convince Californians that their state was prone to earthquakes. Despite the traumatic experience of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, it was only in the third quarter of the twentieth century that local businesses and politicians began to countenance significant earthquake safety measures. Resistance to government regulations has been spirited ever since. Other scholarly studies have examined the economics of seismic denial in California. Ted Steinberg's Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (2001), for example, tracks and analyzes the tenacious opposition of real estate interests and civic boosters to stringent (and expensive) building codes and zoning laws. Geschwind also pays attention to legal struggles and political conflicts, but his main contribution to the historiography comes from his material on earthquake scientists. Trained in the sciences himself, he devotes much of the book to the accumulation of modern earthquake knowledge, the mapping of faults, and the development of new technologies. Noting the rudimentary state of seismic science at the beginning of the twentieth century, he carefully charts improvements in measuring instruments (such as torsion seismographs) and advances in our comprehension of the moving earth (the elastic theory and so forth). . . .

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