How did citizens of the United States come to regard themselves as progressive proprietors of modernity, and simultaneously as the natural defenders of a great primordial land? It is with this query that Caroline Winterer sets out her study of the nineteenth-century creation of a geological heritage in the United States. How the New World Became Old tells a fascinating history of how the modern status and social order of North America was legitimized by naturalist accounts of a glorious ‘deep-time’ past. It is a beautifully written book that shows how dinosaurs and fossils became intertwined with everything from Christianity to science, nationalism, psychoanalysis and art.
Throughout the book, Winterer foregrounds how geological substances such as fossils and strata were given meaning and torn in various directions to serve convictions of religion, politics and science. The term ‘deep time’ was not used by Winterer’s actors but encapsulates their way of thinking about a distant past. It is pivotal to the story of how geological timescales were amplified and renegotiated in national and scientific narratives of North America. Chapter 1 begins with the seventeenth-century idea of a six-thousand-year-old infant Earth, where European illustrations of the Genesis story depicted the Americas as degenerate. North American naturalists were thereby motivated to defend the great antiquity of their land, while the political newness of their kingless state was a distinctive feature against European superiority. In Chapter 2, we learn how the nineteenth-century popularization of fossils and strata spurred American geologists to claim a past even more ancient than the castles and ruins of Europe. The following chapters explain how the development of earlier geological eras pushed North America’s historical claims further back in time. Uniformitarian and catastrophist theories of famous (European) geologists took centre stage in this invention of a North American antiquity which was interwoven with a ‘divine purpose’. While Charles Lyell argued for fixed geological laws that slowly moved the age of the world forward, Louis Agassiz imagined a sudden and disruptive Ice Age. In any case, the massive coal beds, fertile plantation soil and cave paintings were testaments to an ancient continent and a human psyche that aligned North American prosperity with the powers of God. In Chapter 9, we learn how the idea of an infant Earth returned in the twentieth century and has continued into present-day American politics. While deep time was popularized, it was becoming an obstacle to the biblical chronology of the Earth accepted by conservative Christians. The solution became the inherently American temporality of Young Earth Creationism, in which the world is six thousand years old and dinosaurs are pictured in Noah’s ark. Chapter 9 thereby identifies a disruption in American geological thinking where Christian nationalism and deep time were made incompatible. Winterer traces this disruption to the crisis that followed the unknowability of geological time. Deep time was thus exchanged for a comprehensible ‘shallow time’.
Winterer works effortlessly with naturalist publications, primarily from geology and palaeontology, but it is her analysis of visual sources that underscores the pervasiveness of geological thinking in North American science and culture. She materializes deep time for the reader in geological maps, diagrams, drawings, paintings and museum exhibitions. She vividly describes how ancient America was portrayed, contested and popularized via images of prehistoric plants and animals. In Chapter 6, for instance, she compares landscape art before and after the invention of the Ice Age in the 1830s, when humans gradually diminished into tiny figures in depictions of massive glacial structures. The continued use of dinosaurs in contemporary ‘Young Earthism’ confirms the alluring nature of prehistoric imagery.
The book will appeal to historians interested in the exploitative aspects of nineteenth-century deep-time thinking. Winterer shows how geologists, palaeontologists, craniologists, ethnologists and palaeo-artists contributed to imagery that legitimized the social status of white settlers. These naturalists pictured Native Americans as inferior by asserting their supposed failure to turn American coal into fossil fuel and dismissed their claim to land while labelling ancient mammals the ‘true natives’. Winterer also explains that naturalists legitimated slavery in the Deep South by depicting it as a natural companion to the cotton that prospered in the prehistorically enriched soil. The same group developed a racial hierarchy for cavemen, where the artistic North American ‘Cro-Magnon’ type was placed on the same branch as white people, which was imagined to have parted from branches such as the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Negro’. Native Americans were deemed too ancient to be included in this family tree, and women were entirely omitted from imageries of prehistoric humans. Winterer further covers the exploitative infrastructure of geological and palaeontological inquiry – for instance, how Native Americans and enslaved African Americans contributed to collections of fossils and bones in American museums, and how artwork in naturalists’ publications and lecture halls was designed by uncredited wives. Winterer therefore reveals how geological thinking was dependent on the agency and expertise of social groups who derived no recognition from it. The book presents the power of prehistory in the creation of exclusionary national imaginaries, but it also generates further questions about how marginalized actors might have applied their own visions of the future on these traces from prehistory.
Winterer has succeeded in writing a book about the deep past that is highly relevant to our present. As Winterer showcases the creation of an ancient New World, we simultaneously learn about its implications for current issues such as landownership, social inequality and the catastrophist origins of Anthropocene thinking. The book shows how temporalities have spatial implications and how visions of the past have been fabricated to legitimize the idea of a great (white) United States. Part cautionary tale, part love letter to the unknown, Winterer’s book urges the reader to not shy away from the great mystery of time that defines our common past and unfolds into endless possibilities for the future.
