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Author: Janet B. Pascal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698171853
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
Before 1914, traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant going by land across the entire United States. To go by sea involved a long journey around South America and north along the Pacific Coast. But then, in a dangerous and amazing feat of engineering, a 48-mile-long channel was dug through Panama, creating the world’s most famous shortcut: the Panama Canal!
Author: Janet B. Pascal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698171853
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
Before 1914, traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant going by land across the entire United States. To go by sea involved a long journey around South America and north along the Pacific Coast. But then, in a dangerous and amazing feat of engineering, a 48-mile-long channel was dug through Panama, creating the world’s most famous shortcut: the Panama Canal!
Author: Marixa Lasso
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
The Panama Canal's untold history—from the Panamanian point of view. Sleuth and scholar Marixa Lasso recounts how the canal’s American builders displaced 40,000 residents and erased entire towns in the guise of bringing modernity to the tropics. The Panama Canal set a new course for the modern development of Central America. Cutting a convenient path from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, it hastened the currents of trade and migration that were already reshaping the Western hemisphere. Yet the waterway was built at considerable cost to a way of life that had characterized the region for centuries. In Erased, Marixa Lasso recovers the history of the Panamanian cities and towns that once formed the backbone of the republic. Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal recollections, Lasso describes the canal’s displacement of peasants, homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the lost cities and towns—a space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and people—which served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburbs built exclusively for Americans. By restoring the sounds, sights, and stories of a world wiped clean by U.S. commerce and political ambition, Lasso compellingly pushes back against a triumphalist narrative that erases the contribution of Latin America to its own history.
Author: Noel Maurer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691248079
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
An incisive economic and political history of the Panama Canal On August 15, 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened for business, forever changing the face of global trade and military power, as well as the role of the United States on the world stage. The Canal's creation is often seen as an example of U.S. triumphalism, but Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu reveal a more complex story. Examining the Canal's influence on Panama, the United States, and the world, The Big Ditch deftly chronicles the economic and political history of the Canal, from Spain's earliest proposals in 1529 through the final handover of the Canal to Panama on December 31, 1999, to the present day. The authors show that the Canal produced great economic dividends for the first quarter-century following its opening, despite massive cost overruns and delays. Relying on geographical advantage and military might, the United States captured most of these benefits. By the 1970s, however, when the Carter administration negotiated the eventual turnover of the Canal back to Panama, the strategic and economic value of the Canal had disappeared. And yet, contrary to skeptics who believed it was impossible for a fledgling nation plagued by corruption to manage the Canal, when the Panamanians finally had control, they switched the Canal from a public utility to a for-profit corporation, ultimately running it better than their northern patrons. A remarkable tale, The Big Ditch offers vital lessons about the impact of large-scale infrastructure projects, American overseas interventions on institutional development, and the ability of governments to run companies effectively.
Author: Jon T. Hoffman
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
This pamphlet describes the critical role of Army officers who defied the odds and saw this immense project through to completion. They included Col. William C. Gorgas, who supervised the medical effort that saved countless lives and made it possible for the labor force to do its job; Col. George W. Goethals, who oversaw the final design of the canal and its construction and, equally important, motivated his workers to complete the herculean task ahead of schedule; and many other officers who headed up the project's subordinate construction commands and rebuilt the Panama railroad, a key component of the venture. In just seven years, these soldiers, thousands of fellow Americans, and tens of thousands of workers from around the world turned the dream of an isthmian canal into reality. Their success immediately ranked among the greatest peacetime feats of the Army and the nation, and it remains so to this day.
Author: Ulrich Keller
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486319253
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
This tale of an unprecedented technological advance unfolds in a compelling narrative of risks, hardships, disasters, and triumph. More than 160 historic photographs depict exotic settings, workers' housing, dredging operations, much more.
Author: Russell S. Harmon
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402032981
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
This book examines one of the most important and complex of the world's tropical rainforest regions: the greater Panama Canal Watershed. The Rio Chagres is the primary water source for operating the Canal, and supplies potable water for municipal use and electricity generation, but science has left this important national resource largely unstudied. The text promotes understanding of the physical and ecological components of an isolated and largely pristine tropical rainforest.
Author: Margarita Engle
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544109414
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
As the Panama Canal turns one hundred, Newbery Honor winner Margarita Engle tells the story of its creation in this powerful new YA historical novel in verse.
Author: Ashley Carse
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
A historical and ethnographic study of the conflict between global transportation and rural development as the two intersect at the Panama Canal. In this innovative book, Ashley Carse traces the water that flows into and out from the Panama Canal to explain how global shipping is entangled with Panama's cultural and physical landscapes. By following container ships as they travel downstream along maritime routes and tracing rivers upstream across the populated watershed that feeds the canal, he explores the politics of environmental management around a waterway that links faraway ports and markets to nearby farms, forests, cities, and rural communities. Carse draws on a wide range of ethnographic and archival material to show the social and ecological implications of transportation across Panama. The Canal moves ships over an aquatic staircase of locks that demand an enormous amount of fresh water from the surrounding region. Each passing ship drains 52 million gallons out to sea—a volume comparable to the daily water use of half a million Panamanians. Infrastructures like the Panama Canal, Carse argues, do not simply conquer nature; they rework ecologies in ways that serve specific political and economic priorities. Interweaving histories that range from the depopulation of the U.S. Canal Zone a century ago to road construction conflicts and water hyacinth invasions in canal waters, the book illuminates the human and nonhuman actors that have come together at the margins of the famous trade route. 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the Panama Canal. Beyond the Big Ditch calls us to consider how infrastructures are materially embedded in place, producing environments with winners and losers.
Author: Julie Greene
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101011556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
A revelatory look at a momentous undertaking-from the workers' point of view The Panama Canal has long been celebrated as a triumph of American engineering and ingenuity. In The Canal Builders, Julie Greene reveals that this emphasis has obscured a far more remarkable element of the historic enterprise: the tens of thousands of workingmen and workingwomen who traveled from all around the world to build it. Greene looks past the mythology surrounding the canal to expose the difficult working conditions and discriminatory policies involved in its construction. Drawing extensively on letters, memoirs, and government documents, the book chronicles both the struggles and the triumphs of the workers and their families. Prodigiously researched and vividly told, The Canal Builders explores the human dimensions of one of the world's greatest labor mobilizations, and reveals how it launched America's twentieth-century empire.
Author: Charles River Charles River Editors
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781505342482
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 44
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Book Description
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the construction written by workers and their family members *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." - Theodore Roosevelt Most people have heard of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but while not as many have heard of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World, those who have are aware that the Panama Canal is considered one of them. In a world where few natural rivers carved out over eons of time have reached a length of more than 50 miles, the idea that a group of men could carve a canal of that length seemed impossible. In fact, many thought it could not be done. On the other hand, there was a tremendous motivation to try, because if a canal could be successfully cut across Central America to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, it would cut weeks off the time necessary to carry goods by sea from the well-established East Coast of the United States to the burgeoning West Coast. Moreover, traveling around the tip of South America was fraught with danger, and European explorers and settlers had proposed building a canal in Panama or Nicaragua several centuries before the Panama Canal was actually built. By the late 19th century, the French actually tried to build such a canal, only to fail after a great deal of resources were put into construction and after workers died of malaria and other illnesses. At the turn of the 20th century, not only was the need for a canal still there, but the right man was in the White House. Indeed, President Theodore Roosevelt, a celebrated outdoorsman, might have been the only president who could have foreseen and accomplished such an audacious feat, and even he considered it one of his crowning achievements. He wrote in his memoirs, "There are plenty of other things I started merely because the time had come that whoever was in power would have started them. But the Panama Canal would not have started if I had not taken hold of it, because if I had followed the traditional or conservative method I should have submitted an admirable state paper to Congress...the debate would be proceeding at this moment...and the beginning of work on the canal would be fifty years in the future. Fortunately [the opportunity] came at a period when I could act unhampered. Accordingly I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me." Building the Panama Canal was a herculean task in every sense. Taking about 10 years to build, workers had to excavate millions of cubic yards of earth and fight off hordes of insects to make Roosevelt's vision a reality. Roosevelt also had to tie up the U.S. Navy in a revolt in Colombia to ensure Panama could become independent and thus ensure America had control of the canal. By 1914, ships were finally traversing through the Panama Canal, just as World War I was about to start, and a century later, the Panama Canal remains one of the world's most vital waterways. The Panama Canal looks at the origins and history of the important trade link between the Atlantic and Pacific. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Panama Canal like never before, in no time at all.
