Making the New World Old: American Monuments and the Relics of Natural History

Abstract: As Americans made "Nature"—and as they made themselves as a new nation—they made "relics." This paper explores such weighty objects of early national and natural history, how they operated simultaneously as specimens, monuments, and relics, and how the labor of natural history made them so. Among the most substantial were the bones of the American Incognitum , or mastodon, discovered, collected, assembled, and exhibited by Charles Willson Peale and his sons. For Peale, these relics evidenced not merely the mastodon's former power, but the antiquity, force, and promise of his country. As specimens they distinguished his museum as a place of science—as objects slotted into an Enlightened natural historical narrative, exhibiting America's growing mastery of knowledge and the world itself. As monuments, they celebrated not merely divine but human creation—the labor of American naturalists and nationalists to establish the United States as Nature's Nation and secure the country's place within the transatlantic world of science and statehood. An epilogue explores the consequences of this imperial project by assessing the recent history of Tomanowas, or the Willamette Meteorite, an exemplary object or being now residing, in contested fashion, in New York's American Museum of Natural History.