At this moment, the concept of the Anthropocene is challenging us to rethink our relationship to the earth and its history, but we have not yet fully understood the extent to which our knowledge of earth history has shaped the historical culture of modernity. This study examines the relationship of geology — including its central narratives, metaphors, topoi, and other imaginative tools — to the broader historical imagination that has until now been called “historicism.” Two major figures in the rise of historical conservationism and aesthetic historicism in nineteenth-century Europe...