- 28 May 2019
- Rieppel: Assembling DinosaurRieppel: Assembling Dinosaur
Time: 12:00
Lukas Rieppel (Brown University)
Assembling the Dinosaur
Martes 28 de mayo de 2019, 12 horas
Lugar: Aula de seminarios (1er piso) IMF-CSIC
c/ Egipcíaques, 15. 08001 Barcelona
Although dinosaur fossils were first found in England, a series of dramatic discoveries during the late 19th century turned North America into a world center for vertebrate paleontology. At the same time, the United States emerged as the world’s largest industrial economy, and creatures like tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus, and triceratops became emblems of American capitalism. Large, fierce, and spectacular, American dinosaurs soon dominated the popular imagination, making front-page headlines and appearing in feature films. This paper will follow dinosaur fossils from their point of discovery in the American West to large philanthropic museums in urban centers such as New York to explore how these remarkable creatures were entangled with the commercial culture of North America’s Long Gilded Age. Business tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan made common cause with vertebrate paleontologists to capitalize on the widespread appeal of dinosaurs, founding a new generation of natural history museums to cement their own reputations as generous benefactors of science and demonstrate that modern capitalism could produce public goods in addition to profits. Behind the scenes, these museums adopted bureaucratic management practices to streamline the conversion of economic wealth into cultural capital while mounting spectacular exhibits designed to bring a large and socially diverse audience into their public galleries. In these exhibitions, philanthropic museums inserted dinosaurs into a teleological narrative of evolutionary progress that naturalized the period’s controversial transition from a fiercely competitive form of free-market capitalism to a more managed and organized political economy dominated by large corporate firms.
Short CV:
Lukas Rieppel teaches the history of science, the history of capitalism, and nineteenth century United States history at Brown University in Rhode Island. He studied biology and the history of science at Harvard University, and his research has been supported by fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, and the Science in Human Culture Initiative at Northwestern University. In June his book Assembling the Dinosaur. Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle (Harvard University Press), will appear. at 12:00
