Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
I'm Anne Strainchamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
Imagine hiking in one of those red rock deserts in Utah on a scorching afternoon.
So hot and dry, there's nothing moving for miles.
Once this was lush green land, flowing with water, and once a giant sauropod walked right here.
Its feet sank into the mud, its footprints dried and baked into rocks.
And today, 150 million years later, they're still here.
Yeah, they're huge.
You can go off into the scrubby desert, and for literally millions of years,
the tracks of not just one dinosaur, but multiple dinosaurs have been kept intact.
And those footprints are really, really, really big.
Caroline Winterer is one of millions of people who've made the trek to marvel at dinosaur tracks
in places like Utah and Texas and Wyoming and Colorado,
places where you can feel the wonder of deep time.
Which is such an American experience.
I mean, we've stood and looked out at the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Valley,
and you're looking at hundreds of millions of years of geology.
But Caroline Winterer has a special perspective on all that wonder.
She's a historian at Stanford, and she wrote a book that is one of the best things I read this year.
It's called How the New World Became Old, The Deep Time Revolution in America.
So it links dinosaurs and the geological strata and time itself to American identity.
The story begins in the late 1800s, when people in the U.S. first began digging up dinosaur bones.
They didn't even have names for them yet, but they fell in love with them.
And we're still in love with them, right?
Absolutely.
Dinosaurs are like our national mascots.
We give them nicknames and cartoon identities.
We make theme parks out of them and put them on lunchboxes.
But to understand where Caroline is going to take us,
you have to know that when people first began digging up all those fossilized bones,
they didn't realize how old they were.
Right, because people still thought the Earth was only 6,000 years old.
Yeah, and they also thought this continent was the last one to emerge
after God drowned the Earth in an epic flood.
The one Noah survived.
So this new world was just a baby on the world stage,
a bratty, inferior, younger sibling compared to the older civilizations in Europe and Asia.
But then, looking at that geological strata,
they began to realize that this continent was actually billions of years old.
That's the deep time revolution Caroline refers to,
and it becomes a real source of national pride.
Yeah, but here's what I think is key.
The way Caroline tells it,
this deep time revolution is like the missing piece in the story of American exceptionalism,
because it was used not just to bolster America's standing in the world,
but also to justify manifest destiny, Christian nationalism, even genocide.
And so the lesson here is that we need to examine wonder and awe,
to think about where those emotions take us and the uses to which they're put.
And in America, it all begins with dinosaurs.
It does.
So I wanted to start by talking about dinosaurs.
You wrote that this book began with dinosaurs,
that you've loved them ever since you were little.
Yeah, in part because I grew up in the West, in the United States,
where unlike the East, whatever dinosaurs there are,
are often very visible on the surface, right?
In places like Utah and Colorado.
But I also was lucky to grow up in a house with parents who seemed to like picture books,
and they had a wonderful two-volume edition of dinosaur paintings from the 1950s.
And my favorite was Pachycephalosaurus,
which has this crazy big bulbous head with lots of knobs on it.
So to a four-year-old, this seemed like the best kind of dinosaur to be the really weird looking one.
But yeah, it catapults you into this world of imagination.
And, you know, unlike many people, I did not outgrow my childhood adoration.
It's funny how dinosaurs and childhood go together, right?
Like you, I loved those picture books about dinosaurs.
I loved going to natural history museums, seeing dinosaur skeletons.
But there were probably, I don't know, 20, 30 years there as an adult
when I didn't have dinosaurs in my life.
And then I had kids, and there were the dinosaurs again.
And I was thinking about, well, reading your book got me to think about how that is a bedrock experience,
bedrock American experience, and about how dinosaurs are embedded in our personal childhoods,
but also in the childhood of the nation.
So why and how did dinosaurs become part of our national identity?
Yeah, so it turns out that this idea of deep time, which is the container for the dinosaurs,
unfolds over the course of a single century.
So that's why I dare to call this a revolution, a deep time revolution,
because by historical standards, this is a very rapid changing of people's minds.
Yeah, 100 years is nothing.
It's nothing in the drop of time.
And so if you had interviewed, let's say, the founding fathers in the American Revolution,
all of them would have given you a version of this answer to the question, how old is the earth?
They would have said, well, it's about 6,000 years old.
How do we know this?
Because if you run the numbers in the Bible, that's kind of what you roughly come up with,
a creation date of around 4,000 BC.
And somehow over the course of the next century, the bottom drops out of that chronology.
And through a variety of new projects, for example, the desire to find what are called
fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution, the desire for white people to expand into Western
lands beyond the Mississippi, projects that we have simply thought of as the building of
the national infrastructure, in fact, required the building of a new national chronology.
They were digging into strata, for example, in upstate New York, where they found really weird
early life forms like the famous trilobites, which are about as big as, you know, if you were to wear
a pendant on a necklace, it's about that big, like a big silver dollar size little creatures
that crawl around.
And this was very haunting to Americans.
There were layers of rocks, and then suddenly there were trilobites.
And how had this happened?
They started to wrestle with this in the 1820s, you know, during the John Quincy Adams administration.
So I love this image of ordinary Americans out there digging for the transcontinental railroads
and pulling up not just trilobites, but also dinosaur bones, these things that are larger
than any living creature today.
I'm trying to sort of think my way back into how incredibly knocked out people must have
been and just disbelieving.
Yeah, these things are huge, and they like to pose with them.
Like, look at this giant femur.
It's as tall as an adult human.
And they love especially to ship these things to Europe to show that Europe might have Roman
ruins, but Americans have something not only older, but bigger.
And that's really striking, because Pompeii had just been uncovered the previous century.
And the reason Pompeii was so exciting was because there were actual human bodies there.
But Brontosaurus is way bigger than that.
So we too have bodies in America, and our bodies are bigger than your bodies.
So there's, you know, this is very much about the creation of American nationalism.
So you said at a certain point that you started writing a book about dinosaurs, and then realized
eventually that you were writing a book about God.
And you've got this lovely line, deep time caresses the divine.
Can you try to bring that alive a little bit in terms of how it must have felt to people?
The reason that, you know, normal people could get on board with this is because the deep
chronology of time makes God even more amazing, because it says he operated over much larger
spans of time than we had thought.
Oh, the mere six days of Genesis is just child's play in comparison to the billions of years over
which God continually lavished the greatest expression of his love, which is his creative
energies.
And they talk about that constantly.
Look, look at God, look at him.
He's implanting the trilobites, and then he's implanting the coal forests that are now giving
life, illuminating energies to us.
And then he goes again.
He gives us these enormous brontosauruses that we are now uncovering.
And then he does it again and brings us the animals of the Ice Age.
And then finally, his crowning creation, man, again, using the Victorian terminology, man.
And this enables this even more majestic conception of God.
And so, a lot of people say, yes, the dinosaurs are for me.
They are a sign of God's love.
God gave us Adam and Eve and also the dinosaurs.
But surely, there were debates about how the hell do you put these things together?
Were there dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden or not?
Yeah.
The problems really don't start until the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.
And the reason that problems begin is because Darwin posits a way to imagine the changing
of the guard in the life forms, you know, from trilobites to dinosaurs and all that.
Without any godly agency, he says that it's not God necessarily.
It is nature, natural selection that weeds out life forms that aren't working.
So, something must have been wrong with the trilobites because eventually they went away.
But that wasn't God deciding one day, oh, I can't stand these trilobites.
They were fine.
But now I just know more.
Enough with the trilobites.
No more trilobites.
Like someone cleaning out their closet, you know, spring cleaning.
And now we shall have the brontosaurus.
And that was how actually the most famous scientist in America, Louis Agassiz, promoted things.
And he went out on the lecture circuit and said all these things.
He was the great rival to Charles Darwin.
And he said God had these repeated creations and destructions, creations and destructions.
And this is very exciting as a story of the United States.
Darwin requires natural selection over long periods of time and very few exciting destructive moments.
No, in fact, it's a whole series of tiny, tiny little moments, you know, minute changes in, I don't know, the shape of a trilobite tail that might lead to them dying out.
Yeah, it's almost like he's the policeman on the side of the road saying nothing to see here, nothing to see here is so boring.
And it is also non-teleological.
It is not necessarily leading to anywhere.
You don't need a God.
And Darwin worries very much about this because he's a believer.
And he sort of like a kind of Frankenstein's monster thing, like, what did I do?
But the combination of not needing a God and non-teleology is extremely problematic for many people.
And in response to that, a new sort of branch of Protestantism unfolds in the wake of the Civil War, which we know today as fundamentalism.
And they return to the comforts of the short chronology in order to rescue a teleological active God in the story of life on Earth and in the story of the United States.
They really get going in the early 20th century as the young Earth creationists and their numbers continue to grow today, precisely for the reasons that I have mentioned, that there is something existentially terrifying about the scenario that Darwin presents to us.
God is unnecessary, and whatever force is operating out there, it is not necessarily leading to us.
We are incidental.
Yeah, and I think for a lot of Americans who grew up secular, completely adopted a scientific viewpoint, that whole argument seems just arcane.
But I think, in fact, this argument about, well, do we live in a landscape that's saturated with meaning?
Do we have a place here or not?
Is this planet special or just adrift in an ocean of dark space?
Yes, I think these are questions that still occupy us.
They certainly are.
They are the most profound questions of our existence as humans.
And they are simultaneously inspiring and also deeply disturbing.
Who are we?
Why are we here?
Where are we going?
What does it all mean?
This is why we create philosophy, and it is why we create gods, to try to wrestle with those questions.
Where do people go when they die?
It's all very, very troubling and inspiring at the same time.
And I was very excited to realize that dinosaurs were helpful for thinking about that.
Helpful and also dangerous.
America's discovery of dinosaurs and deep time would also lay the groundwork for Christian nationalism, manifest destiny, and genocide.
More in a sec.
Thank you.
Hey, it's Steve.
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Thank you.
This is Wonder Cabinet, and I'm talking with Stanford historian Caroline Winterer
about her book, How the New World Became Old, The Deep Time Revolution in America.
So let's get into the shadow side of wonder and awe.
Going back to the theological implications of deep time,
America's national identity gets linked to this idea of God's divine favor.
This is the most favored land.
Not only do we get all these amazing fossils, we get the fossil fuels.
We're standing atop a treasure trove of wealth that God has created and given to us, Americans, to use.
So, I mean, you can just watch Manifest Destiny and Christian nationalism hold hands,
and terrible things came from that.
Indeed, and to the people who were finding deep time, they did not realize that.
They did not realize what they were doing.
A few of them did.
A few of them commented on what it meant to extirpate the Native peoples from the Cotton South
to make room for the slave-worked cotton fields that were packaged as good
because God had given us the Cretaceous, which creates very rich limestone soils.
So a few of them comment on this.
What were they saying?
I mean, it's sort of like AI today, right?
There's a few naysayers in the corner, or I guess I would say the sort of the tech revolution
in general, that there's a kind of techno-utopianism at work.
And there's a deep time utopianism in the 19th century.
It's new.
It's exciting.
Who knows where it will lead?
And we can't stop the forces of God's progress.
God is taking us forward.
I mean, this is a feature of deep time that maybe is worth mentioning, that it moves forward
in a linear way.
And it displaces the ways that Americans and others in the 18th century thought about time,
which is that it's often cyclical.
You know, we will return to events.
But deep time requires a forward movement of time from the past to the present.
You don't repeat.
You know, strata don't, like, repeat themselves.
This is seen to be an objective fact of nature.
Time moves forward.
So they say, well, how could I stop that?
We have to replace the Choctaw forests of Georgia with cotton fields, because that's what
the strata tell us to do.
So they think that they are doing God's work, as so many people always think they're doing,
right?
We are the heroes of our own narratives.
Did deep time provide a rationale for the removal of Native Americans?
Because, I mean, I partly sort of thought, well, here they're falling in love with this ancient
land, why aren't they also falling in love with the original inhabitants, you know, the
Native Americans who are here?
Was there any part of deep time that provided a kind of rationale or underpinning for that
movement?
Absolutely.
With the building of the railroads after the Civil War, a lot of the railroads are being
built in what was then Lakota Sioux, and is today Lakota Sioux land in the Nebraska
territory, et cetera, and essentially what they decide upon digging down into the fossil
remains first, into the 50 million year old extinct mammals, like the paleocamels, et
cetera, and then below them, the dinosaurs themselves.
They say, oh, no, these were the first Americans.
Native peoples, they came late.
They're immigrants like we are, but God is not behind them, by the way.
So the first Americans are dinosaurs and then furry rhinoceroses.
And moreover, the horse and the camel, which are native to the Americas, went and populated
the rest of the world.
So you're welcome, rest of world.
We gave you the horse, starting with little Eohippus, the dawn horse.
It grew and became the great engine of civilization for Asia and Europe and then was returned to
its rightful home of America by the Spaniards during their God-defended invasion of America
in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
So that was the new narrative that they locked into place.
The 50 million year old mammals were the first Americans, not the Native Americans.
That's right.
Yeah, the Native Americans are not the Native Americans.
And furthermore, and they go one step further because they love to talk about psychology.
What was more, Native peoples are incapable of comprehending deep time.
This is them talking, right?
Not me.
Of course.
And so they start actually sending anthropologists into the field in the 1870s, and they collect
what are called Indian calendars, which today are called winter counts.
And these are records every year of, like, let's say this was the year of the stars fell.
There was an asteroid, sorry, a meteor shower, and this would be recorded on a cowhide, for
example.
These only went back about 100 years.
And so the anthropologists returned to the Smithsonian and Yale and other places and said,
look, we have evidence that the Native peoples cannot comprehend deep time because, look,
they're just creating these 100-year-old records.
So, you know, this is all justification for Native removal or extinction.
And then the kind of the pièce de résistance of this way of thinking is when they realized
that a lot of the Ice Age megafauna, so the Ice Age in North America ended around 10,000 or
11,000 years ago when there were already Native peoples in the Americas.
And the woolly mammoth, for example, the mastodon, the woolly rhinoceros, the giant sloth, they
were finding the bones, but they were not finding living examples of those creatures.
And so they said, these scientists, ah, the Native Americans committed a massive genocide
of the Pleistocene megafauna, the Ice Age megafauna.
And so having been genocidal themselves, our own genocide against the Native peoples is justified.
So, yeah.
It's hard to hear this stuff.
It is.
The train of thinking is extremely disturbing, but it's a reminder that the stakes of deep
time are massive.
They were massive in the 19th century, and they are massive today.
We locate in deep time some of the questions that are most important to us.
Who deserves to be here?
Who gets to be here?
And on what basis do they get to be here?
On what grounds do they participate in the civic polity?
And on and on and on.
Yeah.
And that is obviously still with us.
The Civil War happens in the middle of all of this, and I'm just wondering if it interrupts
the deep time narrative at all, or how the deep time narrative shifts with it, because
you would think it might interrupt this triumphalist narrative, because America suddenly does not
look like this glorious nation.
It looks like blood-soaked battlefields.
Yeah.
The Civil War coincides with the publication of The Origin of Species.
It arrives in the United States in November of 1859, and it hits the national press where
it's reviewed during the Civil War.
The mechanism of natural selection is mass death.
It's not the death of you or the death of me.
It's the death of hundreds of thousands of people, roughly 750,000 people dying as a direct
cause of battle.
I mean, that has to dwarf any other American war.
It did at the time, and it does still today.
This is a doorway to modernity in the sense that we begin as humans to cope with mass death,
mass everything, the mass society, mass transportation.
Mass war, a mass death.
And if anything, the mass death of the Civil War sort of helps to jolly along the idea of
deep time, because people can imagine that underneath their fallen son in an Antietam grave, there
lies another noble being who also gave its life to God's cause.
You know, the trilobites they're sending around are dead trilobites.
The brontosaurus bones they're shipping to the King of England saying, ours are bigger than
yours.
Literally, they are saying that these are dead dinosaurs.
So there is a renewed presence of death in everyday life because the Civil War puts it there, but
also breathes meaning, majesty, and martyrdom and all kinds of, you know, Christian qualities
into this death.
And also, because afterward there's a need for a national reconciliation, a re-sewing of the
Confederacy into the rest of the nation.
And that's how you can think of the transcontinental railroads as a giant zipper, you know, zipping
up the United States and ending over here at Stanford.
That's what then leads to the discoveries in Nebraska, et cetera, of these very, very ancient
animals.
So it's all bound up together.
What happens much later as we move into the 20th century and post-World War II?
I know this isn't what you wrote about in the book, but we've been talking about mass death.
People continue to be interested in dinosaurs.
All of the time-related sciences take off in the atomic age and are connected intimately
to mass death and the nuclear project.
How does all this deep time dinosaurs get woven together in the atomic age?
Yeah.
Well, one of the interesting things that happens in 1980 is that now that the general public
has been habituated to the idea that apocalypse comes from the skies, you know, we've had
the nuclear, you know, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the asteroid theory of dinosaur
extinction, you know, is first proposed in an article in 1981 by Luis Alvarez and his son
Walter Alvarez at UC Berkeley.
And they say that, you know, the dinosaurs didn't die out gradually as people in high school
at the time had been learning for the last century.
But instead by Armageddon coming from the sky that this asteroid came in, you know.
And kind of precipitating a kind of nuclear winter.
Just the thing that, you know, in the Cold War we were all so terrified of.
Yeah.
So we're ready to accept it.
And this is not to say that the scientific theory is wrong.
It's just to say that the public is primed to accept certain things.
It's primed to accept deep time in the 19th century because of the Civil War.
It's primed to accept the asteroid theory of what is essentially neocatastrophism.
The problem with Darwin was always that gradualism is boring.
But look, an asteroid.
Super exciting.
Much more exciting.
And furthermore, it is discovered, you know, 10 years later that the asteroid fell in the New World, you know, off the coast of Mexico.
And its most exquisite and detailed and amazing remains can be found in dot, dot, dot, the United States.
In the dinosaur lands of Nebraska, et cetera, you know, in the Badlands.
I keep hearing echoes of Donald Trump, you know.
We have the best of the biggest dinosaurs, the biggest coal seams, the biggest asteroids.
Yeah.
It can go there, right?
We have the deepest time.
We have the biggest asteroid.
And, you know, come to Nebraska.
Well, so let's take this story up to the present.
If those 19th and 20th century Americans saw this land as a God-given Garden of Eden, here in the 21st century we have a very different narrative, right, of a post-lapsarian America in which those, all that fossil fuel consumption turned out to be the original environmental sin.
And so in the span of 100 years, which, you know, we began by talking about what a short period of time that is, we have irrevocably altered what took eons of time to build.
So going back to that existential terror of deep time, it seems like we're now living with a nightmare version of it.
Deep time is the gift that keeps on giving, but you don't know if it's, you know, the gift that you didn't want or the gift that you did want.
In the 19th century, yeah, it has this lovely God-give-us-this-and-that aspect.
But now the idea of the Anthropocene is a way of, once again, deploying deep time to come to terms with our greatest existential questions.
In this case, what have we done?
Which is very biblical in some ways.
You know, what have I done here?
I did not know.
Or maybe it's a Greek tragedy.
But the idea of the Anthropocene is the ultimate projection of humanity into the space of deep time.
And it gives us a way to frame and to cope with what to us seems extremely frightening.
That said, there are a number of people who say, you know, yeah, but don't worry.
Because deep time has a kind of soothing gift, which is that, yeah, we may knock ourselves off the earth in, let's say, a thousand years.
We'll fill the skies with garbage.
And most of the current animals will die off.
But the earth will keep going.
You know, we're gone.
But let's stop being so self-centered.
There will be new life forms.
And like sort of weird gods, we will be the midwives of life forms that would not have appeared had it not been for our massive destruction of the earth.
So that's how deep time can really cut both ways as tragedy and as a kind of weird benevolence.
And could deep time, do you think, offer, I don't know, a different, more hopeful narrative in any way?
I mean, is there a way to kind of go back and revive any of that sense of wonder and awe that folks had back in the 19th and 20th century, perhaps re-sacralize the natural world?
It certainly did in the 19th century, the realization that what you are looking at is just the most recent representative of a story, a never-ending story.
I mean, that's when we got the national parks, which, you know, how they were created is also a scar on our past.
But they are one of the greatest things to have come out of America.
Yeah, they are the national cathedrals.
They're the secular cathedrals of the United States.
No other nation had them at the time.
And you're right that there was a violence to their creation, the eradication of the native peoples who lived there, you know.
But they also are born of deep time.
The first national parks, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, are born of this idea that in the strata is God.
And we need to allow people into this national cathedral to see the face of a past so deep that it brings you in contact with your maker and that the only appropriate response is silence and wonder.
You know, that sounds like a Puritan sermon from 1630.
There's a captivity narrative from the 17th century that ends, stand still and see the wonder of the Lord.
That is absolutely the national parks.
So can we create a wonder at the natural world that also incorporates the wonder of all peoples who inhabit the earth?
You know, we're getting there, but we're not there yet.
Yeah.
So just I have a couple of questions just about time itself.
Today, it seems to me, we have the opposite problem of deep time.
Our modern time frames are so short.
We're inundated on just a daily, hourly basis with news of now.
And I'm just curious how different our sense of time is today from that earlier generation you've been describing.
Not much, actually.
Really?
But yeah, deep time emerges at the same time as rushing.
And there's actually, there's a wonderful book called The Railway Journey by a guy named, his last name is Schivelbusch.
And he talks about how the first railway journeys undertaken in the 1840s and 1850s, people feel like we do on our smartphones, like ping, ping, ping, you know, everything is happening.
Because they were going 30 miles an hour, which is faster than anything but a ship would have gone at the time.
But this is over land.
And they have a sense of sensorily overwhelming qualities.
Like here's an image, here's an image, here's a village, here's a village.
Oh, it's all going so fast.
And they had all kinds of diseases, railway spine from the acceleration and the deceleration of the train.
And deep time emerges as the opposite of that.
So the faster we go, the deeper the time.
And, you know, we're back to now to the Big Bang, you know, like, I don't know how old the universe is, is like 13 billion years old.
And it's absolutely no coincidence at all that that goes along with our sense that we are all going too quickly.
And I think that our brains love to play with this.
It is in some senses a manufacturer, not manufactured in the sense that corporations are kind of sinisterly giving this to us,
but that we delight in rolling around these things in our minds and coping with, on the one hand, deep time.
And then on the other hand, my phone is pinging me again.
This is delicious for us.
It's entertaining.
I love that way of thinking about it.
I mean, as opposed to really kind of breaks my usual catastrophizing.
Oh, my God, everything's getting too fast, too fast.
I can't breathe.
This is bad for us.
That's a much better way of framing it.
I don't know if it's scientifically correct.
This is the view from Caroline.
Caroline Winterer is the William Robertson Coe Professor of history and American studies at Stanford University
and the author of How the New World Became Old, The Deep Time Revolution in America.
Well, I have to say, you two gave us a lot to think about there.
And you know, in an odd way, this kind of dovetails with the episode that I'm working on for next week.
I'm going to be talking with the economist Rebecca Henderson about how to reimagine capitalism.
And she has a perspective I really haven't heard before.
I'm Anne Strainchamps.
And I'm Steve Paulson.
Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont.
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