Restoring the Paleo-West: Fossils, Coal, and Climate in Late Nineteenth-Century America (January 2019)
Historians have long understood the American West as a region shaped by aridity. Yet, by analyzing the novel imaginaries that emerged from the scientific and commercial interaction with fossils and coal in the late nineteenth century, this article reveals that the discovery of lush and lively paleo-environments also significantly influenced the history of this region. The physical geography and remnant resources generated over the course of geologic time in the American West decisively influenced western settlement and the advancement of American science in the late nineteenth century. Through government reports, scientists breathed new life into the ancient denizens and environments of the West. Where their contemporaries often saw an eternal desert, many scientists saw a malleable and ever-evolving environment pregnant with potential. Boosters subsequently absorbed the authority of these scientific ideas to lend credence to their plans to remake the region into an agricultural paradise using capital and coal-fueled technology. In some ways anticipating modern attempts to restore landscapes to their pre-anthropogenic states, some boosters drew on these vibrant scientific images and narratives of lush paleoenvironments to challenge the previously dominant perception of the American West as being arid and hostile to life. Scientific visions of formerly fertile lands were coupled with revolutionary coal-fueled technologies such as the transcontinental railroads, making vast human-induced climatological changes an empowering possibility to a nation driven to colonize its frontier.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
Daniel Francis Zizzamia;
(2015)
Making the West Malleable: Coal, Geohistory, and Western Expansion, 1800–1920
(/isis/citation/CBB915846070/)
Thesis
Marlena Briane Cameron;
(2017)
Fossil Excavation, Museums, and Wyoming: American Paleontology, 1870-1915
(/isis/citation/CBB144188127/)
Book
Thomson, Keith Stewart;
(2008)
The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America
(/isis/citation/CBB000774877/)
Article
Thomson, Keith;
(2011)
The “Great-Claw” and the Science of Thomas Jefferson
(/isis/citation/CBB001232030/)
Book
Cameron Blevins;
(2021)
Paper trails : The US post and the making of the American West
(/isis/citation/CBB121158714/)
Article
McMillan, R. Bruce;
(2010)
The Discovery of Fossil Vertebrates on Missouri's Western Frontier
(/isis/citation/CBB001031246/)
Article
R. Bruce Mcmillan;
(2023)
Albert Koch’s Hydrarchos: A Hoax or A Bona Fide Collection of Bones
(/isis/citation/CBB354774746/)
Article
Jordan D. II Marché;
(2019)
“Giant Birds of Old”: An 1837 poem by James Dwight Dana (?) on the supposed makers of the Connecticut Valley's fossil trackways
(/isis/citation/CBB796867178/)
Article
Brice, William R.;
(2004)
Henry Shaler Williams (1847--1918) and Punctuated Equilibiria
(/isis/citation/CBB000502282/)
Book
Gowan Dawson;
(2016)
Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-century Britain and America
(/isis/citation/CBB200052380/)
Article
Newell, Julie R.;
(2005)
The Troost Crinoids: Lost, Found, and (Finally) Published
(/isis/citation/CBB000630866/)
Thesis
Rieppel, Lukas Benjamin;
(2012)
Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001567402/)
Book
Dingus, Lowell;
Norell, Mark A.;
(2010)
Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex
(/isis/citation/CBB001023269/)
Article
Vetter, Jeremy;
(2008)
Cowboys, Scientists, and Fossils: The Field Site and Local Collaboration in the American West
(/isis/citation/CBB000850404/)
Article
Joseph H. Hartman;
(2021)
The importance of the museum in antebellum U.S. Western Territorial exploration: Part 2. The roles of Hayden and Meek in a paradigm shift in geologic and paleontologic studies
(/isis/citation/CBB328483331/)
Book
John M. Findlay;
(1992)
Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940
(/isis/citation/CBB934663478/)
Book
O. Alan Weltzien;
(2016)
Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes
(/isis/citation/CBB606577407/)
Book
William Wyckoff;
William Cronon;
(2014)
How to Read the American West: A Field Guide
(/isis/citation/CBB642290845/)
Article
John H., Jr. White;
(Fall/Winter 2009)
Hunting buffalo from the train
(/isis/citation/CBB396420850/)
Book
Adam R. Hodge;
(2019)
Ecology and Ethnogenesis: An Environmental History of the Wind River Shoshones, 1000–1868
(/isis/citation/CBB797794499/)
Be the first to comment!