American History Hit - How Did Fossils Change America?

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

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.  American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Deep within the earth's crust, tectonic plates grind and heave, colliding, folding, and thrusting vast slabs of rock skyward to form towering mountain ranges.

Ancient inland seas surge across the land, carving channels and leaving behind thick layers of fertile sediment. Then come the glaciers, ice blanketing the uplifted earth, scouring it clean, carving deep, U-shaped valleys through granite and schist. mighty rivers then follow like lifelines tracing the contours of the continent. The restless motion of those plates sparks volcanoes and earthquakes, shaping and reshaping the land in an endless cycle of creation and destruction. North America, as we know it, and like all the earth, was born from these colossal natural forces. But humanity's recognition of that fact, our awakening to the earth as a living, shifting thing,

was itself a seismic change in American thought. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for clicking through to another episode of American history. I'm 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. phenomena 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? 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. 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, 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 forests layered where the coal is, for example? But they begin to see, wow, this is, you know, it probably took a really long time for these various deposits of Earth to, you know, 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 6,000. 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. And it flies absolutely directly in the face of catastrophic myths like the Noah Flood story, which, you know, a flood is a catastrophe. right? And biblical history imagined many of these catastrophes happening to explain the modern world. But by the 19th century, the industrial revolution and the expansion of slavery into the cotton south and, you know, a series of other economic and industrial transformations are bringing to Americans' attention that it's possible, actually, that the Earth's history happened not only in a very different way, but in a much, much longer way.

And we can't underestimate the intelligence of these generations. I mean, they were kind of, you know, connecting the dots. It was the fact that so much of common belief was in their face that it was hard to challenge it. But there must have been a lot of writing, a lot of thinking being done on this fact. People actually aren't really worried about the age of the earth until the 17th century, when Europeans begin to be confronted with alternative chronologies from other places that they're visiting like China. And so that's why they actually become obsessed with this 6,000 year number, which didn't really exist before that time. It's Europeans saying, well, you know,

we want the Bible to be not just the unique history of the Hebrew people. We want the Bible to be the history of the whole world. So we're going to run the numbers on the Bible, right? We're going to get our calculators or our abacuses, you know, whatever, sheets of paper. And we're going to add up all of the generations and the begets and whatever dates we can find. And we're going to come up with this number. And 400 BC, in fact, it's October 23rd, 400 BC on a Saturday night, is determined by James Usher, an Irish archbishop to be the age of the earth as he declares it in 1660. So this is sort of floating around for a couple hundred years as authoritative science, right? It's religion, but it's also science at a time that people didn't see a conflict between the two. But it's only in the

course of the 19th century when people are intensively coming into contact with the ground underneath their feet because of the industrial revolution. And over the course of various digging programs, you know, trying to find fertile soil in New Jersey, calcium carbonate enriched soil because they've exhausted the soil after 200 years of colonization. Again, the fossil fuels of the coal forest, a stratum that is today called the Carboniferous era, it's very, very long ago. They begin to be just confronted from all side with the fact that this could really not have happened super quickly without a critical thing, which is a miracle. 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, you know, as they might have imagined before. And so that's why uniformitarianism, this idea of slow, you know, boring, non-catastrophic changes becomes a substitute for catastrophic flood stories like the story of Noah. It all really intersects with the rise, 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 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, 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 democratic republic and versus the ancient monarch. of Europe who are always threatening to reinvade them. 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. 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. 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 convince 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 grander. So take that old world.

You know, 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. You know, 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, tyronosaurus wrecks. You know, 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 people. 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 Southern States that way for the ease of using enslaved labor. That's exactly right. As white Americans move, into the lands that we call the Cotton South, so Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi in the decades after 1800, they have to encounter, you know, the question,

how do we get this soil to be fertile? So again, they start digging and they uncover this very rich layer of what is called the Cretaceous. It just means chalky, right? It's very rich in minerals. And they say, aha, this is a great fertile place on which to build cotton plantations. And it must mean that long ago, God prepared the southern states of America for chattel slavery because there used to be an ancient ocean here, which we're finding in the Cretaceous,

where we find these giant sea monsters and they're like amazing. But now they've all formed this very rich layer of soil on which we can create cotton plantations. And it's obvious that God would not have created this soil if he did not want us to use black people to work that soil. So that's where we get the term black belt for the sort of layers of the lower south. First, it refers to the black soil that is exceptionally rich. And then eventually it begins to refer to the black people who work the land there. I don't get the connection between finding black soil and then justifying slavery. That seems like a leap.

It's a leap, but they are up against a growing number of northerners and, you know, former enslaved people themselves saying slavery is unjust. It is a human rights violation. And we need to get rid of slavery. We know these people as the abolitionists and southern planters are grasping at straws, any argument that is going to justify the existence of four million slaves below the Mason-Dixon line. And so if God made an ancient ocean and wants black people to work the land on that ancient ocean, so be it. They form part of what's called the pro-slavery argument.

And it is preached from every pulpit in the South. But the pulpit of deep time. The pulpit of deep time. Yeah, you have to kind of simultaneously, you know, believe that the Genesis myth is maybe sort of true. I mean, they're all, you know, Bible reading people. But now alongside the Genesis story, there is the deep time story. So it is fascinating how we can carry multiple and, in fact, contradictory stories in our heads at the same time. Well, that's the modern world, isn't it?

I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like this to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter, we should be looking at, send us an email at a.H at history hit.com. We'd love to hear from you. It all happens in the context of the Second Great Awakening, which was all throughout the night. 19th century, which was so much about reaching back to, you know, the Bible for strength in the face of this modern emerging world. That group must have been very threatened by this idea for obvious reasons. But how do they absorb it and I imagine use it to their own good?

By the end of the Civil War era, there are a growing number of evangelical Protestants who begin to push back against what they see is the sidelining of the Genesis story of creation. So many, many Protestants say, yeah, I can do both, right? I can read the Genesis story on Sunday and then go out and dig for really ancient fossils on Monday and fine. 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 400B.4 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, you know, 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 arc recently where there are dinosaurs aboard. So it's interesting. Yeah, they track science in order to like absorb it and reject it. It's very interesting. I'm taken by your idea that this, you know, there's two tracks for the average American citizen. You can go to church, but then you can also make money. That's 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, we're 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, 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 forests, but then also on Sunday's 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?

Louis Agassiz is the greatest scientist you have never heard of. You know, he's been completely eclipsed by Charles Darwin, but Louis Agassiz, a Swiss scientist who is a Sikh French accent, comes to the United States in 1848, and he becomes this nationally famous figure. He goes out on the lecture circuit, and everyone thinks he's handsome, and he has a million students. 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. 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 Agassi just is just jumping up and down in rage. He can't stand the origin of species, and he becomes the chief American 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. So, of course, even though the United States is still so new, Americans are at pains to constantly say, yes, yes, yes, we are new. But that is just a sign of God's benediction, special mission for the United States. Yeah. All this and more you can find between the covers of this important new book,

How the New World Became Old, the Deep Time Revolution in America. This is a really exciting conversation for me. I mean, it's rare that you land on something that is a really new academic idea that doesn't get enough articulation. And this is just that. Carolyn Winter, who has been our guest today, William Robertson co-professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University. It is an honor to talk to you, Carolyn. Nice to meet you. Nice to be true. This was a great pleasure. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week we release new episodes, two new episodes, dropping Mondays and Thursdays.

All kinds of great content, like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now.