The idea of “deep time” was invented in the last two centuries. Deep time refers to the idea that the Earth is billions of years old, not the 6,000 or so years suggested by a literal reading of Genesis. Like all new concepts, “deep time” created new problems while resolving old ones. This talk will explore the new problem of catastrophes generated by deep time. In the Genesis account, Noah’s Flood is the defining catastrophe in Earth’s past and the human past. There were of course many other bad things that happened in the biblical account, but Noah’s Flood stood out among all others. But deep time, with its immensely long time scale, opened up room for all kinds of other catastrophes to account for the multiple extinction events that now became visible in the fossil record. Why had the dinosaurs died out? Why had the trilobites disappeared? Noah’s Flood became a catastrophe, though not necessarily THE catastrophe. What is more, the definition of “catastrophe” itself was pushed and pulled amid the enormous social and political revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. What was the opposite of a catastrophe, when sin and redemption receded as the shaping forces of earth and human history? How did new catastrophes like the Asteroid-Wiping-Out-the-Dinosaurs Thesis of 1980 respond to cultural and political forces? This talk will explore all these things, with special reference to the history of the United States, as explored in Caroline Winterer’s recent book, How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton, 2024).

Caroline Winterer is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University. She teaches courses on American history before 1900, the history of ideas, and the history of science. She is the author of five books—most recently, How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America. She speaks and lectures widely on the relationship between the present and the past.

Moderation:
Mannat Johal