Issue #21 Articles

The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12The year 1811 seemed to bring curses upon the infant United States. Abnormally high spring floods along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers washed away many new settlements and homesteads. A second war with Great Britain loomed. Shawnee war chief Tecumseh was having some success in his crusade to unite Native American tribes in an alliance against the white man. Presiding over all this there was the legendary Comet of 1811. Many still viewed these cosmic wayfarers as portents of impending disaster. When the trans-Appalachian states viewed an eclipse of the sun on September 17, the doomsayers needed no other indication that something awful was in the offing. Still, few suspected Mother Earth herself would play a part, producing three of the largest earthquakes ever recorded.

The Subterranean Realms of Northern California

The Mysterious Blast at California’s
Port Chicago
Late on a Friday afternoon in 1979, a man walked into the office of the president of Georgia’s Elberton Finishing Co., Joe Fendley, Sr. Introducing himself as R.C. Christian, he informed Fendley that he wanted to order a monument. Fendley replied that his company was a wholesaler and not involved in individual orders. “Then he told me what he wanted,” Fendley said. What Christian was asking for was a miniature Stonehenge that would be called the Guidestones, a monument that would be for the “conservation of the world and to herald the coming of an age of reason.”

California's Lake Monsters
Do unknown creatures lurk the depths of California’s freshwater lakes? Surprisingly, the evidence for their reality is compelling.

Columns

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