Synopses & Reviews
Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal’s
Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era’s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future—images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal’s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation. Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining these and other images of the Panama Canal project,
Seaway to the Future shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those perceptions.
Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
“Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum
Review
“In the idealized space of the Canal, imperialism seemed benign, scientists banished disease, engineers conquered nature, and the United States imposed a middle-class social order.”—David Nye, author of Technology Matters
Review
“Missal forcefully demonstrates that the construction of the Panama Canal was a multifaceted physical and cultural process, freighted with rich ideological meanings at the dawning of America’s Century.”—Janet Davis, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Circus
Review
“Missal’s eloquent mission to open the Canal’s cultural locks [is] a work worthy of its new era as a thoroughly Latin American asset.”—Gavin O’Toole, Latin American Review of Books
Review
“Provide[s] a useful vantage on the world bequeathed to us by the forces that set out to put America astride the globe nearly a century ago.”—Chris Rasmussen, Bookforum
Review
“The utopian visions that Missal explores so well can be seen as extending far beyond the United States to the future of the world under U.S. leadership.”—Kristin Hoganson, American Historical Review
Review
“Missal takes his readers on an evocative and illuminating journey through the world of the Panama Canal’s construction. The book is filled with ideas and insights, and it is insightfully in dialogue with the methodology of cultural history and with the (relatively) new historiography on U.S. empire building. . . . Seaway to the Future will surely interest scholars and students concerned with the history of the United States in the world.” —Julie Greene, Journal of World History
Synopsis
Arrows in the Dark recounts and analyzes the many efforts of aid and rescue made by the Jewish community of Palestine--the Yishuv--to provide assistance to European Jews facing annihilation by the Nazis. Tuvia Friling provides a detailed account of the activities carried out at the behest of David Ben-Gurion and the Yishuv leadership, from daring attempts to extract Jews from Nazi-occupied territory, to proposals for direct negotiations with the Nazis. Through its rich array of detail and primary documentation, this book shows the wide scope and complexity of Yishuv activity at this time, refuting the idea that Ben-Gurion and the Yishuv ignored the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust.
Synopsis
The building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation.
About the Author
Alexander Missal, a journalist in Germany, earned his Ph.D. in Anglo-American history from the University of Cologne.
Table of Contents
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Approaching the Panama Canal: An Introduction 1. Logistics of Expansion: The Long Road to Realization 2. American Triumph: Explaining the Canal Project 3. The Engineered View: The Panama Canal in Pictures 4. Ideal Community: The Canal Zone as an American Utopia 5. Canal Celebration: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition Conclusion: Visiting a Construction Site Notes Index