The Canal Builders

February 15, 2009
With the centennial of the opening of the Panama Canal coming in five years, interest has resurfaced in a topic that has already prompted study, most notably David McCullough's best-selling "The Path Between the Seas" (1977). Whereas McCullough told the classic tale of the first major American engineering feat of the 20th century, these two new books recount only parts of the story. Nonetheless, "The Canal Builders" is more than a footnote. Greene, a labor historian (Univ. of Maryland, College Park; "Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 18811917") is well qualified to tell the story, from the bottom up, of the canal's construction. She interweaves newly unearthed documentary records in a social history linked to the emerging "American empire" and its Bull Moose Progressives, racial segregation, and labor movements. An exceptional writer, Greene has produced a narrative that ranges from the canal's inception up to the current political situation regarding Panama and the United States.

By comparison, "Seaway to the Future", a revision of Missal's dissertation from the University of Cologne, is a methodological footnote aimed at justifying a "cultural history of empire." Though he is a journalist in Germany, Missal's work here relies more on neo-Marxist theory and speculation than on uncovering new facts. Readers are bombarded with the word "empire" throughout the text. Yet "arrogance" and "hubris" explain as much as "empire": the author might have been more to the point if he'd noted that this huge governmental task was an invitation to trouble owing to how labor and racial conditions prevailed in the United States then. Most libraries will suffice with McCullough's classic; larger ones may find interest in "The Canal Builders". Only academic libraries with cultural history collections are likely to find interest in "Seaway to the Future".William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2009
Like preceding chronicles of the construction of the Panama Canal (Matthew Parkers Panama Fever, 2008), Greenes account focuses on its feats of engineering, but in this case, social engineering. Previously an author of a history about the American Federation of Labor, Greene includes the workers experience within the context of the creation of a community from scratch, and that, within the wider contexts of empire building and Progressivism.Many Progressives, Greene relates, visited the canal project; the encouragement some of them took from an American example of governmental socioeconomic intervention contrasts withthe actual on-the-ground character of the canal zoneuntil the completion of the canal in 1914. Greene portrays a complex web of regulations that authority applied to those drawn to the zone. Through many personal accounts, Greene covers conflicts that inevitably arose, centrally over labor rules and a pay structure that discriminated against black workers, among others means of enforcing segregation. Interests in social history and attitudes of the Progressive Erawill be drawn to Greenes perspective on the building of the Panama Canal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)