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by

Alison Laurence

M.A., History

University of New Orleans, 2013

B.A., Classics

Brown University, 2011

Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

September 2019

© 2019 Alison Laurence. All Rights Reserved.

The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper

and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now

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Afterlives of Extinction:

The Politics of Display in the Modem United States

by

Alison Laurence

Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology, and Society

on June 14, 2019 in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society

Long extinct animals have a powerful hold on the American popular imagination. Dinosaurs, in particular, have been iconic and pervasive representatives of a planetary past for much of the twentieth century. While natural history museums are the most obvious spaces in which to encounter extinct animals, these scientific venues have never held exclusive rights to the charismatic megafauna of the planet's past, nor have they controlled their cultural meanings entirely. This dissertation examines sites in which American publics have encountered extinct animals through interrelated case studies that span the twentieth century, including the American Museum of Natural History's fossil halls, Depression-Era world's fair exhibits, the contested construction of a Pleistocene Park at the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles, Sinclair Oil

Company's use of dinosaurs as spokes-creatures for oil culture, and the dinosaurs that currently draw visitors to young earth creationist museums. While detailing these diverse exhibitions, I dig into who exhibits long extinct life, what these exhibits say about the deep past, and how diverse publics have embraced and pushed back against these stories, demonstrating the role of popular display in transforming fossilized animals from scientific specimens to consumer objects and artifacts of everyday American life.

Further, I show how representations of the planetary past and creatures that inhabited the world before humans are inflected with contemporary concerns and serve as vehicles for human values. The exhibition of dinosaurs at the Creation Museum is the most conspicuous contemporary example of extinct animals operating as didactic instruments, deployed to serve a politically interested institution's agenda. While sensational and unusually explicit in its aims, this move is not unique. Since the debut of dinosaur models in Victorian England, three-dimensional scenes from deep time have staked a claim in the political and cultural contests of their moment. From imperial apologia to biblical apologetics, the mute and mutable life forms of the planetary past have been used in defense of diverse narratives. Across all of these case studies, I tease out the explicit and implicit values embedded in these exhibits, emphasizing the presentist human interests that have been mapped onto extinct life.

Thesis Supervisor: Harriet Ritvo

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project owes much to the funny little interdisciplinary community on the eastern

edge of MIT called HASTS. I thank affiliates of the History, Anthropology, and Science,

Technology, and Society departments for their guidance and support during my years in the program. Administrators including Carolyn Carson, Margo Collett, Kathleen Lopes, and Mabel

Chin Sorett have made my life easier. Karen Gardner deserves special thanks for her close attention and care. The faculty has been similarly supportive. I thank my Directors of Graduate

Studies-Heather Paxson, who shepherded me into doctoral work, Chris Walley, Harriet Ritvo, and Tanalis Padilla-and the other MIT faculty who have taught and thought with me over the years: Dwai Banerjee, Will Broadhead, Deborah Douglas, John Durant, Deborah Fitzgerald, Malick Ghachem, Stefan Helmreich, Caley Horan, Dave Kaiser, Chris Leighton, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Anne McCants, Amy Moran-Thomas, Kenda Mutongi, Hiromu Nagahara, Steve Ostrow, Jeff Ravel, Robin Scheffler, Hanna Rose Shell, Merritt Roe Smith, Craig Wilder, and Elizabeth Wood. I owe the most thanks to my committee. I am grateful to Joyce Chaplin for serving as external reader, to Chris Capozzola for helping me to see the bigger picture, and to my advisor Harriet Ritvo for her constant support, incisive critiques, and humor.

The intellectual community of HASTS has improved my work in countless ways, while the genuine warmth of my colleagues there has sustained me. My cohort-Richard Fadok, Clare Kim, Peter Oviatt, Beth Semel, and John Tylko-provided much needed camaraderie. Grace Kim was, effectively, my fourth reader. Her questions and generous feedback are woven into this project and will inform future work. Over the years I've been fortunate to share mental space

with Marc Aidinoff, Taylor Bailey, Rende Blackburn, Marie Burks, Ashawari Chaudhuri, Nadia

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Rodrigo Ochigame, Luisa Reis Castro, Alex Reiss Sorokin, Alex Rewegan, Gabrielle Robbins,

Hilary Robinson, Caterina Scaramelli, Tom Ozden Schilling, Elena Sobrino, Michelle Spektor,

Erik Stayon, Mitali Thakor, Michaela Thompson, Claire Webb, Anna Wexler, and Jamie Wong.

I am also thankful to the HASTS alumni community, especially Etienne Benson, Lisa Messeri,

David Singerman, and Rebecca Woods. Beyond MIT, I was fortunate to find colleagues and

mentors at other Boston-area universities, including Janet Browne, Kit Heintzman, Whitney

Barlow Robles, Victoria Cain, and Zach Nowak. Thanks to the community-building work of

Jessica DeWitt, Anastasia Day, and Elizabeth Hameeteman, I have also found virtual

community, which was critical during the untethered research year and the final writing year.

At conferences over the years I have received emboldening feedback as well as

thoughtful critiques from commentators, fellow panelists, and generous audience members. In

particular, I thank Lydia Barnett, Mark Barrow, Karen Rader, Andrew Robichaud, Nigel

Rothfels, Nicole Seymour, Ellen Stroud, Sandra Swart, and Michaela Thompson. The Call of the

Wild workshops and conversations with Ellie Bors, Gowan Dawson, Noelle Held, Mary Kuhn,

Sally Shuttleworth, and Emily Zakem inspired me to continue seeking out interdisciplinary

spaces. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the impact of previous academic

training, especially my instruction in public history at the University of New Orleans. There Jim

Mokhiber pointed me to "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," Mary Niall Mitchell introduced me to cultural

history, and Connie Atkinson inspired me with her passion for situated storytelling.

This project would not have been possible without the expertise and patience of archivists

and librarians. I am indebted to: Gregory Raml in the American Museum of Natural History

Special Collections and Susan Bell, archivist for the museum's Department of Vertebrate

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Paleontology, who spent many days with me among the bones and boxes; Armand Esai at the Field Museum of Natural History; Richard Hulser and Kim Walters at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; Tal Nadan at the New York Public Library's Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room and David Callahan in the Reserve Film and Video Collection; Joe Hursey at the National Museum of American History Archives Center; and Daniel Brinkman in the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Support for research was provided by fellowships from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the UCLA Library Special Collections, and the American Philosophical Society. In was at the APS, in the summer of 2018, when everything seemed to fall into place as I worked through the papers of George Gaylord Simpson (who appears only as a peripheral character in the following chapters). Adrianna Link, as a scholar, fellowship

coordinator, and fellow dinosaur lover, helped me to see my project more concretely. Further, I am grateful to the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation for sponsoring my final year of writing. I am glad to have met so many generous scholars of education, in its manifold forms, through the fellowship program. In particular, I offer thanks to Claire Arcenas, Jessica Chandras, Ansley Erickson, Nicholas Kryczka, Adam Laats, Tsianina Lomawaima, Campbell Scribner, and Walter Stern for engaging my work and suggesting paths forward.

Many dear friends and family members made space for me during my doctoral work, allowing me to feel at home in Cambridge and elsewhere during fieldwork. My Wellesley relations-Susan Loveland, Doug Hodes, Nathaniel, Caleb, and Margaret-have treated me as more than a second cousin. Rosie Sharp and Jesse Last have also included me in holiday

celebrations with their Boston-area family though I'm not a blood relative. Ben Traisman housed me in New York during a last minute archives visit and shockingly has never blocked my

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films. Lauren and Jake Tower gave me a place to stay in New Haven. Together Archie

Alhambra, Jacob Belser, and Tommy Grossinger have bought me more dinners than I can count.

(And Tommy let me try on his 2016 World Series ring.) Kelsei Schoultz and Billy Kirland have

put me up in their Santa Monica home on many occasions. Mark Patch made much of my

research possible, giving me a place to stay in Los Angeles and driving me all over Southern

California in search of creationist dinosaurs. He was a sounding board for each of these chapters

in its infancy and helped me find direction, though any errors in this work are mine alone.

Then there are the people who had absolutely nothing to do with this project but

sustained me during it. For joy, hope, inspiration, humor and virtual company, I thank: Len

Kasper, Jim Deshaies, and the 2016 World Series-winning Chicago Cubs; Katya

Zamolodchikova; David Onofrey, my junior high Latin teacher, who surely would roll his eyes at

being included here; and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. My digital dissertation accountability group,

Sherri Sheu and Ashanti Shih, supported me through the final year of writing, as did Aalyia

Allibhoy Sadruddin, who has become a dear friend during this process. Beyond any expectation,

David House was an understanding companion even on my worst writing days. I'm thankful for

his goodness and inspired by the care he puts into everything. My chosen family, Rosie Sharp,

Kelsei Schoultz, and Kelly Stock, has cheered me on during this process and been the best of

friends, even though our careers have conspired to place us all in different cities. My parents,

Anne and Daniel Laurence, have encouraged my academic pursuits and loved, supported, and

provided for me during my protracted education. It was my paternal grandmother, Lillian Hodes

Schwartz, who first took me along to museums. In her 93 years, she never stopped learning,

teaching, or telling stories. I dedicate this work to her.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

Planetary H istory as Usable Past ... 1 1

1. ON THE HUNT FOR LOST WORLDS

Encounters with Extinct Animals in Fiction and Fact, 1890-1927... 33

2. POSITIVELY PREHISTORIC

Proprietary Information, Progress Narratives, and Spectacle in Interwar America... 95

3. PLEISTOCENE SPECTACLE IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

Immersive Encounters at the La Brea Tar Pits, 1916-1977 ... 161

4. DEEP TIME DOMESTICATED

Sinclair Oil Company and the Making of a Modern Stone-Age Family ... 219

EPILOGUE

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PLANETARY HISTORY AS USABLE PAST

I

11

INTRODUCTION

PLANETARY HISTORY AS USABLE PAST

In Petersburg, Kentucky, a short drive west of Cincinnati, there is a facsimile of the Garden of Eden. Mannequins of Adam and Eve repose there in a grove of flowers. Close at hand, hidden in the trees, lurks a dinosaur. The sharp claws on its forelimbs suggest that the creature is a predator. It might be modeled after a theropod, the carnivorous group of dinosaurs that includes iconic genera (the taxonomic category above species) like Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus, and

Velociraptor. But animatronic Adam and Eve are undaunted, for they know that neither this

creature nor any other in Creation poses a threat to them. "Before man's Fall, animals were vegetarians," a placard explains, "there were no carnivores."' The anonymous exhibit designer does not expect viewers to take his or her word as truth, and cites the Biblical source material, Genesis 1:30, directly. "And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for

meat....,2

The Creation Museum, where this curious scene is housed, welcomes visitors of all cultures and creeds; but its mission, announced by the tagline-"Prepare to Believe"-is one of evangelism and biblical apologetics. The museum, which opened in 2007 under the auspices of the Answers in Genesis organization, promotes the Word of God as infallible and human reason

(including scientific inquiry) as flawed. Still, visitors could be forgiven for thinking at first glance that the museum is one of natural history for all the animal models and specimens on

1"What Did Dinosaurs Eat?" placard. Visit to the Creation Museum, July 31, 2017.

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display, with excessive exhibit space given over to dinosaurs. A Stegosaurus sits atop the entry

gate and an unclassified sauropod sculpture greets visitors as they enter the building where they

see, before even reaching the ticket counter, an exhibit called "Dinosaurs and Dragons" that uses

monster myths to attest to the coeval nature of humans and dinosaurs. In addition to the

animatronic raptor in the Garden of Eden, dinosaurs feature throughout the museum's dioramas,

which proceed from scenes of prelapsarian harmony to the agony that follows the fall.

Figure 1. In the Garden of Eden at the Creation Museum. Photographsby author, July 31, 2017.

For all its embrace of extinct animals and topics of the deep time sciences, including

geology, paleontology, and archaeology, the Creation Museum rejects entirely the notion of a

four-billion-year-old planet for a fundamentalist young Earth stance. The institution's

deployment of dinosaurs thus simultaneously coopts and repudiates aspects of those scientific

fields engaged in the reconstruction of geological history. The reason that Answers in Genesis

attempts to assert authority over specimens that are typically cast as scientific objects (especially

charismatic creatures like dinosaurs) is, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr.

explain in their study of the museum, to "arm millions of American Christians as

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PLANETARY HISTORY AS USABLE PAST113

uncompromising and fearless warriors for what it understands to be the ongoing culture war in America."3 The dinosaurs displayed in the Creation Museum's exhibits and for sale (emblazoned

on t-shirts, as characters in children's books, and as countless colorful toys) in the expansive gift shop are not there just for entertainment value, though certainly they help to draw crowds of believers and non-believers alike. "Kids love dinosaurs, parents love dinosaurs, so they will definitely be a feature of the museum to get people in," Ken Ham, the museum's founder, told a journalist in March 2001, as Answers in Genesis broke ground on the museum.

Figure 2. Dinosaurs on display andfor sale at the Creation Museum. Photographs by author, July 31, 2017.

Ultimately, though, they are crucial components of a considered campaign that repackages the

most recognizable specimens of natural history museums as "missionary lizards" to promote

young earth creationism and biblical literalism. Dinosaurs typically are "used to teach people that

there's no God, and they're used to brainwash people," Ham told another journalist a few years

3 Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger Jr, Righting America at the Creation Museum

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later, relishing the fact that "evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs."

4

Displayed

within a young earth context, the Creation Museum's dinosaurs participate in a narrative that

undermines scientific consensus, not only about the age of the earth but also with respect to

pressing planetary issues like anthropogenic climate change.

The exhibition of dinosaurs at the Creation Museum is the most conspicuous

contemporary example of extinct animals operating as didactic instruments, deployed to serve a

politically interested institution's agenda. While sensational and unusually explicit in its aims,

this move is not unique. Since the debut of dinosaur models in London in 1854,

three-dimensional scenes from deep time have staked a claim in the political and cultural contests of

their moment. The Victorian saurians, for instance, supported a teleological understanding of

Imperial Britain as the jewel in the crown of human civilizations, made mighty by the natural

resource wealth of its land. From imperial apologia to biblical apologetics, the mute and

mutable life forms of the planetary past have been used in defense of diverse narratives. Just

what those narratives are and how prehistoric creatures like dinosaurs have been used to

persuade audiences of a particular social, political, or historical point is the chief concern of this

dissertation.

4 Peter Smith, "Construction to Start on Museum with Creationist View," The Courier-Journal, March 17,

2001; Ashley Powers, "Adam, Eve and T. Rex," Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2005.

5 Dinosaurs are among the extinct animals models still on display in Crystal Palace Park, though the term

"dinosaur" (while coined in 1841) would not be popularized for another fifty years. See Ralph O'Connor, "Victorian

Saurians: The Linguistic Prehistory of the Modem Dinosaur," Journal of Victorian Culture Journal of Victorian

Culture 17, no. 4 (2012): 492-504. On the Crystal Palace extinct animals, see Nancy Rose Marshall, "'A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell': The Spatial Time of the Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park," Victorian Studies 49, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 287-301. Alison Laurence, "A Discourse with Deep Time: The Extinct Animals of

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PLANETARY HISTORY AS USABLE PAST1 15

FOSSIL FICTIONS AND USABLE.PASTS

"...then as now: exhibit dinosaurs and they will come," noted Stephen Conn, historian of museums, on the reliable popularity of the Mesozoic's charismatic megafauna. Indeed, long extinct life has a powerful hold on the human imagination and dinosaurs, especially in the United States, have been iconic and pervasive representatives of a pre-human past for much of the twentieth century. While natural history museums are the most obvious spaces in which to encounter extinct animals, these scientific venues have never held exclusive rights to the inhabitants of the planet's past, as the case of the Creation Museum well shows, nor have they controlled their cultural meanings entirely. This dissertation digs into who has exhibited long extinct life, what these exhibits have said about the deep past to enthusiastic audiences, and how diverse publics have embraced and pushed back against these stories, using case studies that move from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Together these cases highlight how the material traces of prehistory have been transformed into cultural artifacts and didactic instruments, conveying intellectual and social instruction, in the modern United States.

In particular, I examine how ideas about the deep past and the creatures that lived there speak to and inform experiences of the contemporary moment. As this dissertation demonstrates, diverse parties with radically different interests have attempted to transform the planetary past into a usable one, to borrow language from Van Wyck Brooks, in the service of the present. When Brooks introduced the phrase in 1918, the literary scholar was sounding a complaint of contemporary cultural terrain. "If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one? Discover, invent a usable past we certainly

6 Steven Conn, Museums andAmerican Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 45.

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can, and that is what a vital criticism always does."

7

Similarly and undeniably, the planetary past

is invented, though there is little consensus about the ways in which it is usable (or useful). From

museum scientists and curators to oil company executives, there are manifold ways in which

deep pasts have been made to serve the present.

I focus my analysis on extinct animal exhibitions, including the labor that produced them,

the ballyhoo that promoted them, and the responses they inspired, at once as a way to limit my

study-otherwise endless representations deserved interpretation-and as a way to engage with

work on what Sharon Macdonald has called "the politics of display" and Tony Bennett has

described as the "exhibitionary complex." Thus I emphasize the power dynamics and

disciplinary tactics at play through the authoritative genre of exhibition, including those

encountered in museums, at expositions, advertising, and through other public modes of display.

8

My definition of exhibit is capacious and the following case studies move from natural

history museum halls to world's fair displays, public parks, and shopping centers in order to

capture the varied ways in which Americans have materially encountered long extinct life

throughout the twentieth century. My definition of long extinct life is similarly broad (though the

exclusive emphasis on charismatic megafauna is a reflection of historical actors' interests).

9

I

focus on animals that lived and died out long ago, from the Jurassic Period, 200 million years

ago, to the Last Glacial Period, which ended only around 12,000 years ago, occasionally using

7 Van Wyck Brooks, "On Creating a Usable Past," Dial 64 (April 11, 1918):337-41.

8 Sharon Macdonald, ed., The Politics ofDisplay: Museums, Science, Culture (London: New York:

Routledge, 1998); Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," New Formations 4 (Spring 1998), 73-102 For a helpful review of the evolution of museum studies' engagement with Bennett's formulation, see Victoria Cain, "Exhibitionary Complexity: Reconsidering Museums' Cultural Authority," American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2008): 1143-51.

9 Charisma has been a key category in support of conservation efforts for endangered life to the detriment

of creatures judged to lack it. Jamie Lorimer, "Nonhuman Charisma," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 5 (October 2007): 911-32; Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature, 1 edition (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2015); Shannon Petersen, "Congress and Charismatic Megafauna: A Legislative History of the Endangered Species Act Comment," Environmental Law 29 (1999):

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PLANETARY HISTORY AS USABLE PAST

117

the already scientifically imprecise category of "dinosaur" loosely as shorthand to refer to the much more biologically and temporally diverse creatures on display.0

Scholars in the history of science and science studies are in agreement that the exhibition of nonhuman animals offers a window not onto nature untrammeled, but rather a mirror of the human world that displays them, illustrating (if you know how to look) the gender, racial, and class ideologies of those who collected and crafted the exhibits." The reconstruction of long extinct life is no different. In fact, the mirror is perhaps a better reflection because these creatures cannot be observed in life. Verging on the mythological, they are choice material for what Harriet Ritvo has described as the "classifying imagination" to run amok or otherwise reveal the priorities and interests of the classifiers. 2

Boria Sax has argued that practically all writing about dinosaurs-and by extension, all creatures that lived and died long ago-is "something like science fiction." Compelled to

"construct relatively complete images" of extinct animals, the people who tell these stories "must do so on the basis of evidence that, however sophisticated, is extremely fragmentary and

incomplete." There is necessarily "fantasy and intuition" at play in their narratives." If the stories told about prehistoric creatures are science fiction, so too are the creatures themselves, as are the environments in which people encounter them. For unless a fossil is encountered in situ,

10 Language is, as always, political here. I favor the term "long extinct life" rather than pre-human (since the Pleistocene creatures that feature in The World a Million Years Ago and at the La Brea Tar Pits existed

alongside anatomically modem humans) or prehistoric (a word that suggests a binary and devalues oral record keeping practices).

" Donna Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City,

1908-1936," Social Text, no. 11 (1984): 20-64, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, "Nature by Design: Masculinity and Animal

Display in Nineteenth-Century America," in Ann Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds., Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Hanover, N.H: Dartmouth, 2006), 110-139; Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums ofNatural History (Uppsala: Coronet Books Inc, 1993); Michael Rossi, "Fabricating Authenticity: Modeling a Whale at the American Museum of Natural History, 1906-1974," Isis, no. 2 (2010): 338-361.

12Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifjing Imagination

(Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997.

13 Boria Sax, Dinomania: Why We Love, Fear andAre Utterly Enchanted by Dinosaurs (Reaktion Books,

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preserved in the rock where it was entombed, the setting is a construction, and even then the

creature is not as it was in life nor is the environment unchanged. Preserved only in the

geological record, which testifies to their material reality, long extinct life forms are

simultaneously concrete realities and literal constructions, fictions or figments, even, relying on

the shared etymology of those words. Lukas Rieppel has argued persuasively that fossil displays

are at once icon and index. Rearticulated into something that looks, to scientists' best estimates,

like it did in life, mounted fossils are iconic representations that make pre-human forms

comprehensible. As the same time, fossilized bones and casts of those fossils are indexically

linked to the deep past. They provide a material and empirical connection between modem

humans and long extinct life, despite the millions of intervening years.

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In conversation with Sax and Rieppel, I suggest that extinct animal exhibits should be

understood as fossil fictions--even when that representation is not fossil but pigment, clay, or

plastic, for the exhibition of extinct animals requires those who stage them to fill in

epistemological gaps regarding appearance, behavior, habitat, and more. My dissertation

harnesses this as an opportunity to analyze how the charismatic creatures of the planet's past

illuminate the worlds of their creators and function as vehicles for human values. Beyond

identifying embedded interests, I seek out exhibitions' intended lessons (sometimes received and

sometimes rejected), contributing to scholarship that demonstrates the long history of nonhuman

animals as teaching tools. In eighteenth-century England, for instance, children's literature relied

heavily on animals, real and chimerical, to instruct young readers in the subject of natural history

and about the structures and mores of their society. Harriet Ritvo has deemed the featured

animals "ideal didactic instruments" because authors and buyers believed the animal kingdom to

14 Lukas Rieppel, "Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life: Exhibiting Prehistory at the American Museum of

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PLANETARY HISTORY AS USABLE PAST 119

be intrinsically entertaining for children, a principle that resonates still with twentieth- and twenty-first-century "edutainment." Moreover, teaching children about the natural world was understood as a way to teach maturing readers about appropriate and inappropriate social relationships as they prepared to enter wider society. Animals, as representatives for humans, provided children a polite introduction to the hierarchies of the human world. I treat exhibits as a

sort of multimodal literary genre that can be read both for surface lessons and implicit social instructions.'5

Archival research is my chief method, which I have supplemented with study of digitized newspaper databases, analysis of published primary sources, and site visits. In order to

reconstruct historical displays, I have consulted annual reports, exhibit guides, photographs, planning documents, press coverage, and correspondence among sponsors and the staff (including scientists, artisans, caretakers and more) that created and maintained the displays. This material allows me to access ephemeral exhibit environments and to uncover the intentions that guided them. In analyzing the diverse yet interrelated case studies, I consider how scientific and popular narratives that accompany the reconstruction of prehistoric pasts are characterized

by presentist tendencies and enmeshed in political conversations.

This is not the first study of dinosaurs on display. Lately, historians have used dinosaurs as objects through which to interrogate the history of science, capitalism, international relations, and more. This literature attends to the ways in which unearthed specimens, cobbled-together museum mounts, less precious casts, and other derivative representations are assigned meaning and value.'6 Anthropologists, too, have turned to extinct animal exhibits in order to understand

" Harriet Ritvo, "Learning from Animals: Natural History for Children in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries," Children's Literature 13, no. 1 (January 2009): 76, 81-90.

16 Twin genealogies support this literature. Literature in the history of science that focuses on model organisms has offered examples for telling human stories with the animals we manipulate. Similarly, object

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the institutional culture of museums and the practices by which these animals are brought into being. 1 7Cultural studies scholars have made much of what extinct animals mean to the modem humans who love them. W.J.T. Mitchell christened dinosaurs as the "totem animal of modernity" and observed, while writing at the close of the last millennium, that the modem world is

"overrun with dinosaurs... [that] have escaped from the laboratory and the museum, cropping up in shopping malls, theme parks, movies, novels, advertisements, sitcoms, cartoons and comic books, metaphors and everyday language."'8 Mitchell characterized this movement, playfully, as an "escape." But the dinosaurs had little agency in this trend. The movement of extinct animals from scientific specimens to objects of consumer desire and artifacts of everyday life was a concerted and collective effort, enacted by museum administrators, the press, entrepreneurs,

biographies and, relatedly, commodity histories, a less discipline specific genre practiced by overlapping

communities of historians of science, material culture and museum studies scholars, environmental humanists, and more, have granted a narrative mode for using nonhuman animals, alive or dead, and inanimate objects too to tell stories about the world. On dinosaurs as a lens for the intersecting histories of science and capitalism, see Lukas Benjamin Rieppel, "Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science" (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2012),

http://search.proquest.com/pqdtglobal/docview/1175978007/abstract/99BFB970667047FEPQ/5, the forthcoming manuscript Lukas Rieppel, Assembling the Dinosaur: Money, Museums, andAmerican Culture, 1870-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), and Lukas Rieppel, "Prospecting for Dinosaurs on the Mining Frontier: The Value of Information in America's Gilded Age," Social Studies ofScience, 2015, 1-26. On dinosaurs as a diplomatic spectacle, Ilja Nieuwland, American Dinosaur A broad: A Cultural History of Carnegie's Plaster Diplodocus (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

17 Diana Marsh demonstrates the relationship between institutional culture and the communicationof knowledge at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Using archival methods to analyze the original "Extinct Monsters" exhibit and subsequent iterations plus ethnographic methods to analyze the process of planning the new Deep Time exhibit, Marsh argues that modem modes of communicating scientific knowledge originated in cultural, professional, and institutional shifts (both of practice and value) during the late-1950s. Using the concepts of "complementarities" and "frictions," she demonstrates that collaborative cooperation and dissent are at the root of exhibit production. Diana Elizabeth Marsh, From "Extinct Monsters " to Deep Time (The University of British Columbia: unpublished dissertation, 2014) and Diana E. Marsh, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict,

Compromise, and the Making ofSmithsonian's Fossil Halls (Berghahn Books, 2019). Brian Noble, through archival research and ethnography, emphasizes the "political natures" of dinosaurs. As material entities crafted through political interests, Nobel argues, dinosaurs ultimately "instantiate politics in the public life of the natural." Brian Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology (Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press,

2016),9.

18 Mitchell's text functions as a "Jurassic Ark" offin de siecle fascination with extinct animals. It is not an encyclopedic collection of dinosaur iconography but a cultural history of selected "species." W. J. T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times ofa Cultural Icon (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 5, 76. See also Sax, Dinomania, 2018.

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authors, and corporations, and public exhibition was a key way in which this shift was performed.

Where this study differentiates itself is through attention to the exhibit space, taking seriously the ecology of display or, in other words, the relationships between the exhibited animals and the ways in which the displays were designed to be experienced by visitors. Further, because I attend to manifold forms of extinct life instead of dinosaurs alone, I am able to capture the ways in which exhibit creators have offered a skewed vision of geological history, whether

by presenting a muddled Mesozoic of Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs displayed in close

proximity or an entirely collapsed planetary past with dinosaurs, Ice Age giants, and humans cavorting together. What are the implications of such representations on understandings of deep time? What histories are obfuscated or elided by displaying these charismatic megafauna and claiming them as part of a national (or otherwise anachronistic) past? The following case studies attend to these questions by teasing out different ways in which American audiences have materially encountered deep time.

This phrase-"deep time"--points not to any particular moment but to a different temporal scale entirely. It refers to time at a geological pace rather than a human or historical one. In terms of scale, the designation of "modem" provides a foil, pointing to a precise though ever-shifting temporal present, an immediate and human now. Extinct animal exhibits function at once as representatives of the planetary past and artifacts of the modem moment. They make discourse between the otherwise incommensurable scales of deep time and modernity possible. Borrowing the phrase from nonfiction author John McPhee, who coined "deep time" in his popular writing on the Basin and Range region of the Western United States, historian (and geologist) Martin Rudwick has historicized the concept and demonstrated how European

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naturalists discovered the extreme age of the earth in the pre-Darwinian period and

communicated this revolutionary new idea, particularly through the use of illustrations.'

9

Rudwick argues that naturalists made deep time legible by framing it as deep history, borrowing

ideas and methods from human historiography to communicate and make the earth's

incomprehensibly ancient age sensible on a human scale. Telling stories about long extinct life

forms and the worlds they inhabited has always been the story of (or vis-A-vis) modem humans.

I do not claim to offer a traditional account of deep time itself, which is the purview of

scientists, not historians; instead, I document how different communities have constructed

versions and experiences of deep times through the representation of animals that once populated

the planet. My project thus responds to a recent turn within the humanities toward deep history, a

narrative approach that uses scientific studies to reach deeper into the past than archive-based

scholarship allows in order to capture pre-human histories.

2

In contrast, I employ the methods of

cultural history to demonstrate how historical actors have deployed material practices to

construct their own deep historical narratives (that necessarily reflect the present moment). In

19 John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age ofRevolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Rudwick, Earth's Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Rudwick, "Geological Travel and Theoretical Innovation: The Role of

'Liminal' Experience," Social Studies ofScience 26, no. 1 (1996): 143-59; Rudwick, Scenesfrom Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations ofthe Prehistoric World (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995); Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age ofReform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

20 For deep and big histories, see: Andrew Shryock, Daniel Lord Smail, and Timothy K. Earle, eds., Deep

History: The Architecture ofPast and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Though I am critical of these expansive histories because they lose sight of the individuals (be they human or nonhuman), I recognize their value for revealing change over time. A particularly successful example is Thomas G. Andrews, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), which takes a long view of history but considers a very limited space. On scale, see Sebouh David Aslanian, Joyce E. Chaplin, Kristin Mann, and Ann McGrath, "How Size Matters: Question of Scale in History," The American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1431-1472.

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this way I revise what it means to study deep time and tease out ways in which the material reconstruction of planetary pasts conceals the human values embedded therein.

DO DINOSAURS HAVE POLITICS?

Like the sociotechnical systems that Langdon Winner described in his 1980 essay, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?", the reconstructed creatures of the planetary past are material and cultural artifacts colored by the values, concerns, and politics of their creators. Though

significantly different than the artifacts that Winner details, dinosaur displays do participate in the world around them and have the power to influence the way that audiences think about issues from immigration and empire to armament and climate change, to name a few topics detailed in this dissertation.2'

While it is my goal to show how extinct animals, as both intellectual fictions and material entities, are assigned politics, there is already a robust literature that examines the politics of the deep time sciences. The early history of paleontology in the United States has long been told as a story of gentlemanly science yoked to nation building and westward expansion. Paul Semonin, for instance, uses the American incognitum, or mastodon, to explore the relationship between natural history and national identity in the young republic. Semonin explains,

Because the birth of the nation occurred simultaneously with the discovery of prehistoric nature, early American national rhetoric was filled with images drawn from biblical accounts of the earth's natural history, creating an American antiquity that many of the nation's inhabitants saw largely in terms of Noah's Ark and the Flood."2 2

The discovery of these unfamiliar life forms, originally interpreted as having inhabited a Judeo-Christian antediluvian world, offered a grander identity to a new nation in search of a history.

2 1Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?," Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121-36.

22 Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation's First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of

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Similarly, Lee Alan Dugatkin points to the giant, extant moose that Thomas Jefferson

cited, alongside the extinct incognitum, as proof of his country's natural resource wealth. The

animals of North America were not degenerate with respect to Old World creatures, despite what

the noted French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, espoused, and the massive

bones of these strange beasts could testify to that natural fact.

2 3

More than merely dignifying the

young United States, the study of large fossil vertebrates was bound up in extractive colonial

relations. As Keith Stewart Thomson has argued, paleontological practice both benefited from

and was twisted into a narrative promoting American expansionism.

2

Because the wealth of

American dinosaur resources are concentrated in the arid west, the history of fossil collection

should not be told apart from the history of conflicts that resulted from settler colonial and

official state dispossession of native lands.

Indeed, massive vertebrate fossils were only a complement to the more valuable energy

resources buried beneath the surface and the worlds these creatures were imagined to inhabit

were used to motivate Americans to settle in these arid Western regions, which were lush long

ago. Daniel Zizzamia has shown how late-nineteenth-century U.S. government scientists,

2 Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (Chicago

London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). This story is not exclusively an American one, as Claudine Cohen illustrations in The Fate ofthe Mammoth (Le Destin du Mammouth). Shunning the great man narratives that characterized earlier histories of paleontology, Cohen elects an animal (or, specimen or "object" xxviii) rather than a man as her point of departure. She uses the iconic mammoth in order to unearth the history of paleontological ideas

and practices--and scientific knowledge more generally, as paleontology combines "the sciences of nature and of history. She demonstrates how "fossil objects--through these successive representations, images, and stories--have given rise to many systems of interpretation linked to changing social and cultural configurations." Claudine Cohen, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), xxviii, xxxiv.

24 Keith Stewart Thomson, A Passionfor Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History (Monticello Monograph Series, Charlottesville; Distributed by University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Keith Stewart Thomson, The Legacy ofthe Mastodon: The Golden Age ofFossils in America (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2008).

25 Taking the approach of a historical geographer, Lawrence W. Bradley argues that American paleontology built itself up through the dispossession of vertebrate fossils, which he considers within the historical context of U.S. treaty breaking and the appropriation of native peoples' (natural) resources. Bradley's adoptive father is Oglala Lakota, a relationship that informs his analysis. Lawrence W. Bradley, Dinosaurs and Indians: Paleontology Resource Dispossessionfrom Sioux Lands, First edition (Denver, Colorado: Outskirts Press, 2014).

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through scientific reports that detailed the region's once fertile nature, offered boosters a compelling narrative by which to encourage settlement in seemingly unproductive areas. When they arrived with their plows, one land agent assured potential settlers "the inheritance of the 'old

cretaceous ocean, and the great lakes,' would ensure the success of western agriculture." By using geological and paleontological evidence to motivate the arrival of a settler colonial agricultural society, "humans and ancient things had become allies in the shaping of America's Manifest Destiny." Though the Western Interior Seaway of the Cretaceous did not return in watery form-to the back-breaking chagrin of the farmers that settled there-the great coal store that had formed there did in fact fuel western expansion and the nation's rapid industrialization.26

The boosterish history that Zizzamia relates, which draws a direct line between the Cretaceous environment of what is now called the United States and the European immigrants and their descendants who settled in the American West, is typical of the sort of elision that historical actors enacted when making claims about the deep past. But indigenous peoples of North America also encountered vertebrate fossils and had their own stories to tell about them prior to European incursion and settlement. The fossil locality of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky (approximately 20 miles from where the Creation Museum now stands), served as the "cradle" of paleontological practice in the young United States. But prior to that, Stanley Hedeen has

demonstrated, the salty, swampy soil that attracted animals and preserved those that died there was well known to the Shawnee, who developed legends through which to interpret the wealth of fossils preserved on their ancestral lands.2 7 Similarly, in a wide-ranging "folklore of

paleontology," Adrienne Mayor has gathered oral histories from Native American communities

2 Daniel Zizzamia, "Restoring the Paleo-West: Fossils, Coal, and Climate in Late Nineteenth-Century

America," Environmental History 24, no. 1 (January 2019): 130-156, quotes from 133 and 145

27 Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick: The Cradle ofAmerican Paleontology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 20-30.

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to recover information about the fossils that Indigenous peoples discovered and the ways that

different communities interpreted them, arguing that in a pre-Darwinian moment native

understandings of the earth's history were a legitimate alternative to the nascent disciplines of

geology and paleontology. By taking oral traditions seriously, Mayor questions what counts as

legitimate knowledge and highlight debates about who has claims to know and to possess natural

resources (and indeed whether those objects are resources). Variations of these themes of

contested expertise and ownership appear throughout my case studies.

2 8

Enrolling the deep past in service of the present, whether materially or narratively, is not

exclusive to the United States. It is a common feature of imperial claims on a landscape and

emerges with new regimes as a way to validate political orders. The British often made claims on

the deep histories of colonial possessions in India, South Africa, and Australia. Taking as a case

study the work of nineteenth-century colonial naturalists and ethnographers in the forested region

of India called Gondwana (which would lend its name to the supercontinent composed of

landmasses that now sit in the earth's Southern Hemisphere), Pratik Chakrabarti has shown how

the study of Gondwana's ancient rocks and forest peoples allowed the British to recast India as a

place of "essential primitivism," glossing over the subcontinent's long cultural history and

painting it as an uncivilized place only waiting for British control.

2 9

The white, Western, and typically male subject who has typically shaped the politics of

the deep past either casts native peoples back into this past, imagining them as frozen in that

primitivist phase, or he obfuscates that presence entirely. Such erasure is evident in the records

28 Adrienne Mayor, Fossil Legends ofthe First Americans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2005).

29 Pratik Chakrabarti, "Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past," Past & Present 242, no. 1 (February 1,

2019): 120-1, 123. See also Saul Dubow, 'Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860-1875',

Comparative Studies in Society and History, xlvi (2004); Tom Griffiths, 'Deep Time and Australian History', History Today, li, no. 11 (Nov. 2001); Kirsty Douglas, Pictures of Time Beneath: Science, Heritage and the Uses of the Deep Past (Collingwood, Vic: CSIRO Pub, 2010).

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that Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt produced during their global voyages of exploration. Adelene Buckland has illustrated how their geological writings portray "apparently humanless worlds." The absence of human characters radically, for the time, "helps overturn anthropocentric conceptions of the universe." But more problematically, Buckland has cautioned, "it also effectively evacuates indigenous populations from the world under description." Humans are insignificant here except for that human providing the perspective "through the perceiving eye of the Western male observer."30

As the British attempted to stabilize imperial holdings through connections to the deep past, emergent nations have done similar work in their own lands. Grace Yen Shen has detailed how Chinese scientists who studied geology domestically during the early years of the republic understood that they were studying their homeland, too, defining the politically reorganized nation in respect to the rest of the world.31 Similarly, Fa-ti Fan has argued that antiquities,

including animals and artifacts, were enrolled in the construction of a Chinese homeland. In the late 1920s, in response to the American and European scientific teams that were taking historical, archaeological, and fossil finds out of Chinese Central Asia to be sold in Western markets or displayed in Western museums, China nationalized its ancient artifacts. Seeking to establish itself as a modern and strong nation state and to incorporate outer regions "into the geo-body of the state," Republican officials turned to history, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and geology in order to make claims about the new nation. By 1930, antiquities were legally declared to be Chinese national property. Officials took steps to force foreign scientists into collaboration or out of the nation. As a way to resist Western imperialist incursions, historical objects became

3 Adelene Buckland, "'Inhabitants of the Same World': The Colonial History of Geological Time,"

Philological Quarterly 97, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 226. See also, Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth- Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 29-30.

S'Grace Yen Shen, Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China

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"invaluable treasures that embodied national heritage and national pride... Even objects of nature like fossils became national" as "symbols of sovereignty."3 Thus, such claims have also served as a way to resist foreign incursion and extraction.

CH4PTER OUTLINE

By the turn of the twentieth century, natural history museums in the eastern United States

had accumulated literal tons of extinct animal matter through subsequent fossil rushes popularly referred to as the Bone Wars and the Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush. These Gilded Age

competitions between scientists and their museums to collect the largest specimens and to name the most dinosaurs resulted in overflowing collections that would take decades to prepare for display. My story begins there as natural history museums opened halls full of extinct vertebrates and offered to American museum-goers (and the sensationalist press) fantastical experiences of the planetary past.3 3

In chapter one, "On The Hunt for Lost Worlds: Encounters with Extinct Animals in Fiction and Fact, 1890-1927," I focus on extinct animal displays at the American Museum of

32 Fa-ti Fan, "Circulating Material Objects: The International Controversy over Antiquities and Fossils in Twentieth-Century China," in The Circulation of Knowledge between Britain, India, and China: The Early-Modern World to the Twentieth Century, Edited by Bernard V. Lightman, Gordon McOuat, and Larry Stewart, 2013), 214, 221, 226, 231. Fan argues that China was part of a larger trend. By establishing antiquities laws, China, India, Egypt, and other nations did not just resist Western extraction but reshaped "legal and scientific practices in a global context."

3 With respect to the history of paleontology, the frontier is not a metaphor. It was in this frontier context

that paleontology was both popularized and professionalized. The first fossil rush, characterized as the "Bone Wars" because of the fierce competition between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel C. Marsh to find, collect, and describe new types of dinosaurs. The battle spilled over onto the pages of Gilded Age newspapers and scientific journals.

Mark Jaffee situates this rivalry in the context of the professionalization of science during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Paul D. Brinkman details a subsequent fossil run, which he calls the "Second Jurassic Dinosaur

Rush," at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather than iconoclastic scientists, Brinkman follows the institutions, detailing the competition among the American Museum of the Natural History, Chicago's Field Columbian Museum, and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum during the 1890s to obtain the first and largest sauropod dinosaur skeleton. Though lesser known than the feud between Marsh and Cope, this rush led to innovations in

paleontological practice. Paul D. Brinkman, The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010); Mark Jaffe, The

GildedDinosaur: The Fossil War between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise ofAmerican Science (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000).

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PLANETARY HISTORY AS USABLE PAST129

Natural History in New York City alongside the science fiction stories that they inspired. In his historical ethnography of dinosaur displays, Brian Noble has observed the "intensity of trading" between literature, film, and scientific texts in the early twentieth century. Museum displays and popular literature "refracted and rebounded off each other incessantly."3 By following

representations of extinct animals from museum to science fiction and back again, I chart this exchange and situate it historically. Further, by examining extinct animal display in the context of the early-twentieth-century's exclusionary immigration policies, I show how the exhibition of fossils excavated from the American West and Mongolia contributed to a colonization of deep time. I further contend that narratives attached to and inspired by museum exhibition

demonstrate a distinct failure of the scientific imagination. For the men who popularized extinct animals through serialized stories in magazines and newspapers presented a reflection of their owns worlds. As Donna Haraway has argued, the American Museum's Akeley Hall of African Mammals-created in the same years as the museum's Great Dinosaur Hall-was designed to be a "time machine" that took visitors out of the over-civilized, decadence of modern New York. And yet, instead of taking those early-twentieth century visitors back in time, these displays showed them the dynamics of the world around them. In this sense, it is a time machine, but one that only serves future scholars." The extinct animal exhibits and the time-travel and inter-planetary capers inspired by them function in just the same way.

In chapter two, "Positively Prehistoric: Proprietary Information, Progress Narratives, and Spectacle in Interwar America," I consider the proliferation of extinct animal exhibits beyond natural history museums. Focusing on competing exhibits at the Century of Progress, a world's fair held in Chicago in 1933 and 1934, I demonstrate how exhibitors monetized extinct animals

3 Noble, 51.

3 Donna Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City,

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while attempting to lay claim to and stabilize their meanings. Specifically, I study the

promotional Dinosaur Exhibit sponsored by Sinclair Refining Company and a sensational

Midway show called the World a Million Years Ago, created by model-makers G. Harold

Messmore and Joseph Damon. I trace how these exhibits were inspired by natural history

museum display but revised to suit the interests of these new narrators. In Depression-Era

America, dinosaurs provided catharsis, perspective, and hope for a better future; at the same

time, they promised profits. Through attention to legal maneuvers like trademarks, copyrights,

and patents, I demonstrate how these parties attempted to make the dinosaurs their own.

In chapter three, "Pleistocene Spectacle in the City of Angels: Immersive Encounters at

the La Brea Tar Pits, 1916-1977," I examine competing visions for the creation of a Pleistocene

Park in Los Angeles's Hancock Park, a public green space that happens to host the most

extensive collection of Pleistocene flora and fauna on the planet. These plans, some abandoned

and some enacted, reveal a contentious relationship between scientific exhibition, the audiences

for whom it is imagined, and the interests of the broader public. By tracing the development,

enactment, and occasional abandonment of these outdoor exhibits, I reveal the priorities of those

with the mandate to shape the space. But these were not the people who inhabited the space. The

work and experience of the park guards and caretakers, some of whom lived within the park and

spent decades interpreting the space for the public, is integral to understanding the tensions

between Hancock Park as public space and scientific site. And by further attending to the ways

in which the general public has used the space, for licit and illicit activities, I demonstrate how

those who reside in a place push back against the significance and stories of deep time.

In chapter four, "Deep Time Domesticated: Sinclair Oil Company and the Making of a

Modern Stone-Age Family," I show how Sinclair leveraged the charisma of dinosaurs to sell

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petroleum products and made these creatures a ubiquitous feature of mid-century suburban life. Together with The Flintstones, Sinclair's representations of extinct life reflected contemporary

concerns regarding family dynamics and encouraged audiences to be enthusiastic participants in the American consumer's republic.36

I highlight the Sinclair Dinoland exhibit, a collective of life-size fiberglass dinosaurs, which debuted at the 1964 New York World's Fair then took to the road and toured the United States for the rest of the decade. Stopping in shopping mall parking lots, gas stations, and state and county fairgrounds, Dinoland brought the creatures of deep time to the people. The promotional exhibit, which helped to boost petroleum and petrochemical

sales, made them familiar and accessible, but not mundane. Based on children's obvious, if unexplained, love of dinosaurs, Dinoland and allied promotions, such as stamp album giveaways

and low-priced beach toys, sold fossil fuels to families through their children. At the same time, these sales strategies taught children to love oil culture through their love of dinosaurs.

The dissertation ends with a return to the Garden of Eden, or rather, to the Creation Museum's recreation of it. My epilogue, "Dinosaurs of the Culture Wars," considers how the Creation Museum deploys dinosaurs to promote a literal interpretation of the Bible alongside skepticism of scientific consensus. This contemporary example illustrates the sustained political utility and didactic power of the planetary past. It further addresses some of the scholarly conversations to which I aim to contribute, namely, literature on the cultural function of

museums and other sites of display in the context of the late-twentieth century culture wars. By

36 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers'Republic: The Politics ofMass Consumption in Postwar America, (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

37 Scholars have debated how far back to trace the culture wars. Indeed, there will always be contests over culture in a pluralistic society. This term, however, refers specifically to the widening ideological gap between conservatives and progressives that in the 1980s and 1990s transformed school curricula and cultural institutions (museums in particular) into battlegrounds. Andrew Hartman has argued that the culture wars were a response to the political and cultural fracture of the 1960s. Adam Laats has noted that the "cultural trenches" of the late-twentieth century were "dug during the school controversies of the 1920s" while the conservatism that intensified these battles was a mid-century artifact. Andrew Hartman, A Warfor the Soul ofAmerica: A History of the Culture Wars

Figure

Figure 1.  In the Garden of Eden  at the Creation Museum.  Photographsby  author, July  31,  2017.
Figure 2.  Dinosaurs on display  andfor sale at the Creation  Museum. Photographs by  author, July 31,  2017.
Figure 3.  "TheColossal.Brontosaurus,"New-York Tribune, February 17,1905.
Figure 4.  Allosaurus  and Brontosaurus, Hall of FossiReptiles, August 19,  1907."2
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