Caroline Winterer

He can't stand The Origin of Species.

And he becomes the chief American writer.

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

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.

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 US the largest cotton exporter in the

world before the Civil War.

It is creating the great fertility of the North American plains.