Caroline Winterer

No other nation in the world has the same concept at that time.

It's a very American idea.

That's right.

You know, Europe has what Americans do not have.

It has the Greco Roman ruins, which Americans are terminally envious about.

And it also has the remnants of castles and cathedrals, you know, and they just love going there to see these ruins and

all of this kind of remnants of high culture.

And they look around and they say, we have none of this in the United States, but we actually have something better.

They convinced themselves over the course of the 19th century.

We have something even older.

We have cathedrals of nature.

We have glacial flanks in Yosemite Valley that are millions of years old.

We have geysers spewing out of Yellowstone that are testament to underground volcanoes.

And only a power as majestic and overwhelming as the Christian God could have endowed the United States with this level of super grandeur.

So take that old world, you know.

We're the new world, but we're even older than you are.

That's right.

As Americans begin to excavate in essentially the Nebraska territory after the Civil War, they encounter numerous peoples, the plains tribes of Indians.

And underneath them, they also find the remnants of dinosaurs.

And so they begin to craft a new argument and say, okay, the native peoples of the Americas, all right, they may have been the first peoples in the Americas, but