Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor by courtesy of Classics at Stanford University. This interview is based on her new book, How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press, 2024).
JF: What led you to write How the New World Became Old?
CW: I love dinosaurs! I wondered why so many other people love dinosaurs, especially the terrifying T-Rexes that litter the North American West.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument How the New World Became Old?
CW: In the space of less than a century, between roughly 1800 and 1900, Americans went from believing that Earth was around 6,000 years old (a number they calculated using the dates in the Bible) to thinking it was around 2 billion years old. I call this the deep time revolution, and it was such a massive game-changer for Americans that it ranks up there with the political cataclysms we usually call revolutions.
JF: Why do we need to read How the New World Became Old?
CW: It explains one of the major pillars of modern American identity, which is that the continent is wondrous because it is so primordially ancient.
JF: Why and when did you become an Am​erican historian?
CW: I was a medieval history major in college. I was uninterested in American history until I took a single course with the phenomenal Helena Wall of Pomona College, who made it all seem new and interesting. But obviously all my Pomona history professors were amazing and influential in their own ways.
JF: What is your next project?
CW: I’m collaborating with my Stanford colleague Jessica Riskin on a book about how we’ve thought about the ape/human divide over the last 500 years. For now it’s called The Apes & Us: Encounters at the Species Frontier.
JF: Thanks, Caroline!