RT Review T1 [Rezension von: Hancock, Jonathan Todd, Convulsed states] JF A journal of church and state VO 64 IS 2 SP 354 OP 356 A1 Winiarski, Douglas Leo A2 Hancock, Jonathan Todd LA English PB Oxford University Press YR 2022 UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1801169543 AB "All nature was in a state of dissolution," remarked a shocked Scottish naturalist as he witnessed the first of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 from aboard a vessel bobbing precariously on the Mississippi River (p. 8). The tremblors, which may have reached 7.0 on the modern Richter scale, radiated thousands of miles from the epicenter in the Missouri Bootheel and triggered widespread destruction throughout the Mississippi Valley. They rank among the most devasting natural disasters in North American history, and they coincided with crucial religious and political events in the heart of the continent. Deeply researched, deftly written, and briskly argued, Jonathan Hancock’s Convulsive States situates the New Madrid earthquakes within emerging nineteenth-century debates about the "place of religious authority in nation-states" (p. 2). K1 Rezension DO 10.1093/jcs/csac011