ABSTRACT
Words and images relating to the giant bones and the Taunton stone circulated widely across Protestant networks because they could be pressed into the service of confessionalized visions of world history and of modern geopolitics. This chapter traces the differential circulation of the American antiquities in order to reconstruct the inner workings of the networks that set them in motion. The world histories Protestants built on the foundation of rocks and fossils offered relatively more violent and more benign visions of what Protestant dominance in North America might look like. Louis Bourguet and La Croze were part of the transnational Republic of Letters and also of the overlapping Protestant International, which brought scholars, merchants, missionaries, and political actors of different denominations into league with one another against the common threat of Catholicism. The giant hypothesis may have appealed to New England colonists because of its political and theological significance.
