The Crack at the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

Simon Winchester

Thursday, 19 Oct 2006 at 8:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union

Simon Winchester is the author of The Crack at the Edge of the World. In 1906, there were powerful, destructive earthquakes from Taiwan to South America. In San Francisco, a quake occurred just after five in the morning on April 18, causing fires that raged for three days, destroying much of the city. This was the world's first major natural disaster to have been extensively photographed and covered by the media, and is the subject of Simon Winchester's latest book. He is also the author of The Map that Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, and Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. Simon Winchester has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career, although he graduated from Oxford in 1966 with a degree in geology and spent a year working as a geologist in the Ruwenzori Mountains in western Uganda, and on oil rigs in the North Sea.

---

This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.

Cosponsored By:

• Dept. of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences
• Greenlee
• LAS Miller
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)