Originally published on October 7, 2024 (Episode 378)
Introduction
For a few centuries, the Americas were thought of as genuinely new. But in the nineteenth century, Americans began to doubt the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered fossils of massive crabs; seams of coal revealed entire petrified forests; bones of mammoths, mastodons, and even stranger creatures were found—some nearly within sight of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.
Such finds pushed Americans toward an even greater discovery: not just dinosaurs, geological ages, or evolutionary biology, but what the writer John McPhee has called “Deep Time.” Caroline Winterer’s new book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution (Princeton, 2024) explores how Americans came to realize that their continent—and their world—was unimaginably ancient.
About the Guest
Caroline Winterer is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, particularly the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science.
For Further Investigation
Caroline Winterer, How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution (Princeton, 2024)
—, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale, 2016)
—, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Hopkins, 2002)
Related Episodes
“Timefulness”—a geologist explains the concept of deep time, and much else
“Empire of Climate”—which is also about time, and conceptions of change over time
“Stories Told by Trees”—not Deep Time, perhaps, but definitely a little deeper than Shallow Time
Other Resources
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Harvard, 2003)
Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago, 1995)
Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (Cornell, 1998)
Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (1987)
Listen & Discuss
What would it have been like to stand in a coal seam and realize it was once a forest? Or to stumble on mastodon bones near Philadelphia? Share your thoughts in the comments—and pass this episode along to someone who loves fossils, geology, or just staring into the abyss.
