When fossils were discovered in the US during the 19th Century, it altered American understandings of science, religion, race and more. So what was the Hadrosaurus Foulkii, and why did it have such an enormous effect?Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, joins Don for this episode. Caroline's book on this topic is 'How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America'.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Nick Thomson. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 MediaAmerican History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What was the Hadrosaurus Foulkii and its significance?
Haddonfield, New Jersey, is about 10 miles east of Philadelphia. And on this day in October 1858, lawyer, philanthropist and social reformer William Parker Folk is a filthy mess. Covered in marl, a clay-like substance, as he finishes up a day of meticulous excavation. Folk is searching for dinosaur bones.
Twenty years ago, it seems, farm laborers working in this same pit happened upon unusual skeletal remains, large bones they couldn't identify. They reported the find, but without much consequence. Decades later, folk wonders if he can find more. Paleontology is still a new science in America, and there have been important findings, imprints of feet, individual teeth and bones.
But these have been mostly scattered and incomplete. This pit, where Folk now digs, will eventually produce the first complete set of dino bones in North America, a skeleton that will be named Hadrosaurus fulci, after the man himself. Nose to tail, it will measure more than 20 feet. The animal would have weighed an estimated 2.5 tons.
It's a discovery that will alter the course of paleontology, not to mention how museums are designed and constructed to display the beasts. But it will also change Americans' understanding of the age of their continent, and by association, how they feel about themselves. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for clicking through to another episode of American History Hit. Glad you're here.
Back in the 19th century, against a backdrop of so much industrial, economic, and social transformation, a tectonic shift happened to American consciousness. It had to do with time, specifically the time the North American continent had existed. Prior to the 1800s, there was widespread acceptance of the biblical version of cosmic origin.
The planet was 6,000 years old, and the Great Flood came about 1,500 years later. Noah built the ark, saved the animals and mankind from death by drowning. But that theory would be fundamentally challenged as humans began to closely consider the fossilized bones and other evidence of prehistoric creatures, all of it suggesting the Earth was much older than the Bible would have us believe.
A new book released this year grapples with this entire phenomenon and its profound implications, entitled How the New World Became Old. The Deep Time Revolution in America, authored by historian Carolyn Winterer, the William Robertson Co-Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, where she also chairs the department. It is an honor to meet you, Professor.
May I call you Carolyn? Absolutely. And it's a pleasure to be here as well. The Deep Time Revolution. Let's first consider the book's title. What is the concept of deep time?
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Chapter 2: How did the discovery of fossils change American beliefs?
Deep time is the idea that emerges in the 19th century that the Earth is not, in fact, 6,000 years old as a literal reading of Genesis and the rest of the Bible will tell you, but in fact, millions, if not billions of years old. And that idea emerges quite rapidly in our very modern history.
Chapter 3: What is the concept of deep time?
Of course, they were finding dinosaur bones way back when, including fossils. But no one had really brought this together until the scientific age comes along.
That's right. Yeah, they had definitely found fossils of scary creatures before. And the word fossil simply means coming out of the ground. It doesn't mean particularly ancient. So you could imagine that, for example, the dinosaurs had been around, swimming around the waters of Noah's Ark, for example. So you didn't need deep time for dinosaurs.
You need intellectual revolution to begin to imagine an enormous expanse of time in which the history of the Earth plays out instead of a tiny expanse of time in which the history of the Earth plays out.
As if human beings are not coping with enough in the 19th century. I mean, the whole world is changing under their feet with industry and technology. Suddenly, the one accepted truth, you know, that Noah saved us is gone or at least disappearing. How was this absorbed? How did it enter into the lexicon of American thinking? What went on then?
Well, as you mentioned, the Industrial Revolution, and in fact, that momentous revolution is accompanied by the Deep Time Revolution. They are completely related to one another. One would not have happened without the other. So as Americans and Europeans in Europe begin
digging for, for example, fossil fuels in the ancient coal forests that lie under North America, they begin to ask themselves, huh, I wonder what rocks lie underneath this. I wonder what rocks lie above that. And that's an economic question, right? How deeply do I have to dig into the earth in order to get to the fossil forest layered where the coal is, for example.
But they begin to see, wow, this is, you know, it It probably took a really long time for these various deposits of earth to lie on top of these ancient coal forests. They're pretty deep down there. I'm looking at the processes around me, and I'm having a hard time imagining that this could have happened in 6000 years. years. So probably it happened much longer.
Same thing happens with the fertility of the cotton plantations in the South. They begin to sort of dig around, like which parts of the South are most fertile. Ah, oh, here's a layer way down deep that we're digging. probably was not deposited in 6,000 years, because as I'm looking at the weather and erosion around me, it's not happening very fast.
So they begin to hit upon this concept that today is called uniformitarianism, which is a fancy way of saying that the processes that we observe around us today are also occurring probably in the past. And that's crucial for the idea of deep time, that things happened long ago, the way they are happening now.
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Chapter 4: How did the Industrial Revolution relate to deep time?
And they are now also in the business of denying miracles, right? They're starting to imagine that the earth is disenchanted, that maybe God put the earth into motion, but he's certainly not reaching into our daily lives, you know, saying, here's a comet, here's a flood. He's, you know, as they might've imagined before. And so that's why,
Uniformitarianism, this idea of slow, boring, non-catastrophic changes becomes a substitute for catastrophic flood stories like the story of Noah.
It all really intersects with the rise of the triumphalism in the United States, the rise of manifest destiny and all that sort of thing. The idea that the North American continent had so much of evidence of this deep time in it, from the vast abundance of coal to the amount of dinosaur bones they eventually find out west especially, but they were all already up and down the East Coast as well.
This all contributes to this real feeling of like, we're special because we have a continent that's actually older than everyone else. And that was real, right?
Oh, that was so real. Americans enter the American Revolution with this terminal inferiority complex relative to Europe because, you know, boom, 1776. Yeah, they're a young republic, but there's no evidence that this is going to last very long. So they're this untried new revolution. Democratic Republic and versus the ancient monarchies of Europe who are always threatening to reinvade them.
So, you know, and they come into the 19th century still with this chip on their shoulder. We're such a young nation. We have so much to prove at any moment. The Brits are going to reinvade or maybe France will. So they start casting about for a different foundation on which to build their nationalism. And they end up kind of hitting on this beautiful solution.
They say, well, yes, you know, we are the youngest nation politically. So we are fresh. We are like the atom among nations, you know, in this Garden of Eden that is the new United States. But we are also simultaneously the oldest world of all. when you start thinking in terms of the age of the rocks that lie beneath us.
And so behind our story of manifest destiny that God is watching over our land, there's now this really deep backstory. God, at the very beginning of Earth's history, pulled North America out of the oceans and said, this is my country, this is my land.
And Americans feel so strongly about this that by the late 19th century, they consecrate the first national parks, Yellowstone, Yosemite, all of these quote, national parks, they're like natural cathedrals. They're where Americans go to say, this is where I see God in the antiquity of American nature. No other nation in the world has the same concept at that time. It's a very American idea.
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Chapter 5: What role did uniformitarianism play in understanding Earth's history?
And the celebration of the landscape, as you're saying, these national parks. But it goes back to even the Hudson River School painting where they're attaching these natural, the majesty of the land to a sort of theology of this place.
That's right. You know, Europe has what Americans do not have. It has the Greco Roman ruins, which Americans are terminally envious about. And it also has the remnants of castles and cathedrals, you know, and they just love going there to see these ruins and all of this kind of remnants of high culture.
And they look around and they say, we have none of this in the United States, but we actually have something better. They convinced themselves over the course of the 19th century. We have something even older. We have cathedrals of nature. We have glacial flanks in Yosemite Valley that are millions of years old.
We have geysers spewing out of Yellowstone that are testament to underground volcanoes. And only a power as majestic and overwhelming as the Christian God could have endowed the United States with this level of super grandeur. So take that old world, you know. Right. We're the new world, but we're even older than you are.
Yeah. And it plays, of course, into the whole racial argument of American society. If this place is so old, then it predates everything. And so we belong here as much as anyone who we found here or who we brought here. You know, it's this whole idea of white America attaching itself to this ideal.
That's right. As Americans begin to excavate in essentially the Nebraska territory after the Civil War, they encounter numerous peoples, the plains tribes of Indians. And underneath them, they also find the remnants of dinosaurs. And so they begin to craft a new argument and say, okay, the native peoples of the Americas, all right, they may have been the first peoples in the Americas, but
Gosh, that's not very old because many layers underneath, we're finding the first animals that were in North America. There's the huge first mammals like the Brontotherium and other crazy huge mammals of the era that was called the Miocene. But even underneath those, my goodness, we're finding Brontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus rex. They give these mega muscular names to these animals and say,
Well, these were here before the Indians and we are finding them. So they are ours and the land is ours. And the native peoples really have no claim. And they also don't understand deep time. So we can safely take this land from them. So that's the argument that they make.
But it also has to do with the South. As you say, there's so much good soil down there. This Cretaceous soil, which is a black soil, should be worked by black people. So God had made the soil of the southern states that way for the ease of using enslaved labor.
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Chapter 6: How did America’s self-perception evolve in the 19th century?
I have no problem with that because, you know, science, right? But there are a growing number who today are known as the young earth creationists who begin to craft the first modern objection to deep time and they hang on. to Archbishop Usher's 4004 BC creation date, and they begin to form a sort of onslaught against deep time.
By the early 1900s, they have a new Bible called the Schofield Bible, which begins with Genesis, but then it has the date, 4004 BC, above it. saying, you know, this is our date, right? This is not mythological. This is not just a story that was told long ago. This is true. And they begin to craft a whole school curricula and textbooks that say, yeah, you know, there's dinosaurs.
We have no problem with dinosaurs, but they're not ancient. They're less than 6,000 years old. Today, you can visit the Creation Museum outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, which is enormous. It's very well attended. Millions of people go there every year. It's run by a group called Answers in Genesis, and they deny the antiquity of the Earth. They deny the deep time revolution.
So they've built an ark recently where there are dinosaurs aboard. So it's interesting. Yeah, they track science. in order to absorb it and reject it. It's very interesting.
I'm taken by your idea that there's two tracks for the average American citizen. You can go to church, but then you can also make money. That's the religion, other religion of the United States back then, the emerging mercantile era, where making money is part of a spiritual existence, where you can better yourself and the growth is tangible. That's always been the balancer in American society.
Yes. And, you know, the deep time revolution carries all that with it, that as you're absorbing deep time, you're absorbing what, you know, at the time were believed to be the God given gifts of the industrial revolution, trains, fossil fuels, which actually is a term coined in the 1820s, along with natural resources and energy.
You know, at that time, natural resources was meant to imply that long ago, God had planted these first baby forests on the baby earth as gifts for us modern people. So they're super optimistic about the discovery of sources of heat and light, you know, because for thousands of years, humans, you know, it had been dark and they were always tired.
You know, we forget how hard life was before the Industrial Revolution. And suddenly they found a solution and they directed their energies toward using science and engineering to dig up the fossil forest. But then also on Sundays, giving thanks to the God who implanted those forests long ago. It's quite extraordinary.
I can't miss the chance to mention someone who doesn't get enough notice. Louis Agassiz, the Harvard naturalist and geologist of that time who had so much to do with everything, didn't he?
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between nature and American identity?
But he believes in deep time, but he does not believe in Charles Darwin's idea that deep time is the container for species evolution. He says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. God created each layer of life in a sequence of creation and destruction and creation and destruction over many, many millions of years. So what you're seeing in the fossil record
over deep time is the constant workings of the benevolent creator god not some weird idea that says that god is not necessary yes but god you know natural selection basically says well you know maybe god is out there but we don't need god for natural selection it can happen just according to nature Nature is a kind of way of talking about God without talking about God.
And so Darwin is very, very threatening when The Origin of Species is published in 1859. And Agassiz is just jumping up and down in rage. He can't stand The Origin of Species, and he becomes the chief American philosopher. opponent to this kind of heretical idea that somehow the long story of life can be told without reference to the creator God.
And because he sort of lost the battle with Charles Darwin, we've forgotten about him. But he had many ideas up his sleeve. He's the guy who invented the idea of the ice age that, you know, long ago, at some point, the earth was encased in a layer of ice, it was a snowball earth. And that the reason that the United States is so flat from the Appalachians all the way to...
The Rocky Mountains is because an enormous blanket of ice, not that long ago, crushed the whole American landscape. And who was behind the icy blanket? None other than God himself, preparing America for the great fertile plains that we farm today. So he called the Ice Age that great agent, you know, capital G, capital A.
by which he saw the hand of God in the great geological workings of the world. So different from his contemporary, Charles Darwin, who sees maybe God, but maybe not God in the workings of deep time. It's very extraordinary.
Carolyn, how does deep time, all of which is in your book, the themes of deep time intersect with the idea of American exceptionalism, which was such a big part of the 19th century?
Deep time is at the heart of American exceptionalism because what it is saying to Americans is that, well, you know, God may have been crafting the entirety of the planet, but he was lavishing special attention on North America. And we can tell because this is such a fertile land.
All of the geological processes extending from millions of years to the present have yielded the fossil forests that are fueling the Industrial Revolution, the Cretaceous lands of the South that are fueling the cotton boom that makes the U.S. the largest cotton exporter in the world before the Civil War. It is creating the great fertility of the North American plains.
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