Caroline Winterer: Dinosaurs, Deep Time and the American Soul

T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it: the vertigo of deep time. Millions of years of life and death, compressed into bone and stone.

Two hundred years ago, Americans began unearthing mysterious fossils and giant bones they didn't even have names for yet. Almost overnight, something remarkable happened: the New World became old. The United States went from infant start-up nation to the blueprint for all of creation.

Stanford historian Caroline Winterer traces this deep time revolution in her book How the New World Became Old — and she shows us how profoundly it shaped American identity. We still think of dinosaurs as fun, as children's toys and museum spectacles. Few of us realize how deeply they underwrote a national mythology — one that fueled American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, Christian nationalism and genocide.

This is a story about wonder and awe. And it teaches us that those emotions are neither simple nor neutral.

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• Caroline’s website  
• Caroline’s book "How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America" 

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:20 Dinosaurs and the Deep Time Revolution
00:10:10 Darwin and Fundamentalism
00:16:10 The Shadow Side of Wonder
00:29:00 Deep Time Today