Seaway to the Future : American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal / Alexander Missal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Missal, Alexander.

Series:

Studies in American thought and culture.

Studies in American Thought and Culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Canals--Design and construction--Panama.

Canals.

Canals--Social aspects--Panama.

Panama Canal (Panama)--Social policy.

Panama Canal (Panama).

Panama Canal (Panama)--In popular culture.

Panama Canal (Panama)--History.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (268 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

3rd ed.

Place of Publication:

Madison, Wisconsin : The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

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. Celebrating the Canal: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition

Conclusion: Visiting a Construction Site

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-259) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9786612594830

9781282594838

1282594834

9780299229436

0299229432

OCLC:

608691551