Path of Empire McGuinness, Aims; McGuinness, Aims, III
2016, 2007, 2009-03-12, 20080101
eBook
Most people in the United States have forgotten that tens of thousands of U.S. citizens migrated westward to California by way of Panama during the California Gold Rush. Decades before the completion ...of the Panama Canal in 1914, this slender spit of land abruptly became the linchpin of the fastest route between New York City and San Francisco—a route that combined travel by ship to the east coast of Panama, an overland crossing to Panama City, and a final voyage by ship to California. In Path of Empire, Aims McGuinness presents a novel understanding of the intertwined histories of the California Gold Rush, the course of U.S. empire, and anti-imperialist politics in Latin America. Between 1848 and 1856, Panama saw the building, by a U.S. company, of the first transcontinental railroad in world history, the final abolition of slavery, the establishment of universal manhood suffrage, the foundation of an autonomous Panamanian state, and the first of what would become a long list of military interventions by the United States.Using documents found in Panamanian, Colombian, and U.S. archives, McGuinness reveals how U.S. imperial projects in Panama were integral to developments in California and the larger process of U.S. continental expansion. Path of Empire offers a model for the new transnational history by unbinding the gold rush from the confines of U.S. history as traditionally told and narrating that event as the history of Panama, a small place of global importance in the mid-1800s.
In its 11,000 year human history, the Isthmus of Panamá has been dominated by its relationship to the sea and the rivers that feed it. A unique marine environment, the land bridge shaped its ...inhabitants’ activities, and those inhabitants shaped the Isthmus—from harvesting resources to physically transforming the land to link two oceans. This seminal work explores this intersection between people and the environment, mining the archaeological and ethnological record created during the formation and development of Panamá's maritime cultural landscape. Assessing sites both submerged and on land, the authors explore the maritime history of the isthmus through its many stages: from its prehistoric period through Spanish colonialism to the building of the canal and its function as a route for modern-day maritime traffic. Combining archaeology, history, geography, and economic history, this volume situates Panamá's canal and isthmus in the global economy and world maritime culture, while providing a more complex understanding of human adaptation and the persistence of culture.
A new reading of Panama’s nation-building process, interpreted through a lens of transnational tourism
Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, From Temporary Migrants to Permanent ...Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama considers the intersection of tourism, multiculturalism, and nation building. Carla Guerrón Montero analyzes the ways in which tourism becomes a vehicle for the development of specific kinds of institutional multiculturalism and nation-building projects in a country that prides itself on being multiethnic and racially democratic.
The narrative centers on Panamanian Afro-Antilleans who arrived in Panama in the nineteenth century from the Greater and Leeward Antilles as a labor force for infrastructural projects and settled in Panama City, Colón, and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. The volume discusses how Afro-Antilleans, particularly in Bocas del Toro, have struggled since their arrival to become part of Panama’s narrative of nationhood and traces their evolution from plantation workers for the United Fruit Company to tourism workers. Guerrón Montero notes that in the current climate of official tolerance, they have seized the moment to improve their status within Panamanian society, while also continuing to identify with their Caribbean heritage in ways that conflict with their national identity.
Cutting a path from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the Panama Canal set a new course for the development of Central America—but at considerable cost to Panamanians. 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.
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 Ditchcalls us to consider how infrastructures are materially embedded in place, producing environments with winners and losers.
The big ditch Maurer, Noel; Maurer, Noel
2010., 20101108, 2010, 2011-01-01
eBook
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 Ditchdeftly 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 Ditchoffers 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.
In Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity: Panama's
Assembly, 1984-2009, Carlos Guevara Mann systematically
examines the behavior of the members of Panama's Legislative
Assembly between 1984 and ...2009, an arena previously unexplored in
studies of Panamanian politics. He challenges fundamental aspects
of scholarly literature on democratic legislatures, with important
consequences for understanding democratic politics in Latin America
and other parts of the world. The current literature on
legislatures assumes that legislators single-mindedly seek
reelection or the advancement of their political careers, and that
they pursue these goals through acceptable democratic means.
Guevara Mann shows, however, that in Panama many legislators also
pursue less laudable goals such as personal enrichment and freedom
from prosecution, often reaching their goals through
means-widespread clientelism, party switching, and electoral
manipulation-that undermine the quality of democracy.
On one level, Political Careers, Corruption, and
Impunity contrasts the political behavior of individual
legislators; on another, it compares the actions of legislators
under various regimes-military and constitutional. Lastly, it
engages in cross-national comparisons that contrast the behavior of
Panamanian legislators with actions of representatives elsewhere.
Guevara Mann's sophisticated analysis of the military period and
the transition to democracy, with an emphasis on the history and
functioning of legislative bodies, contains a wealth of new
information about a neglected but intrinsically fascinating
case.
Sovereign Acts Zien, Katherine A
2017, 20170908, 2017-09-08
eBook
Sovereign Actsexplores how artists, activists, and audiences performed and interpreted sovereignty struggles in the Panama Canal Zone, from the Canal Zone's inception in 1903 to its dissolution in ...1999. In popular entertainments and patriotic pageants, opera concerts and national theatre, white U.S. citizens, West Indian laborers, and Panamanian artists and activists used performance as a way to assert their right to the Canal Zone and challenge the Zone's sovereignty, laying claim to the Zone's physical space and imagined terrain.By demonstrating the place of performance in the U.S. Empire's legal landscape, Katherine A. Zien transforms our understanding of U.S. imperialism and its aftermath in the Panama Canal Zone and the larger U.S.-Caribbean world.
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 “Provides 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
We study the May 12, 2019, Mw 6.0 (hereafter Laurel earthquake) and a June 26, 2019, Mw 6.2 (hereafter Manaca earthquake) earthquakes located in a complex strike-slip to subduction transition zone in ...the Costa Rica-Panama border using a dense local network of broadband and strong-motion instruments, concluding that the Laurel mainshock data (hypocenter, centroid, and focal mechanism), concurrently with its aftershock distribution, indicate an almost vertical north-south oriented, dextral strike-slip fault. This fault ruptured at depths between 10 and 30 km in the lower crust of Panama Microplate and the geometry implies a shallow influence of the Panama fracture zone. Meanwhile, for the Manaca earthquake, the aftershocks are concentrated on a 25 km long NW-SE trend, with a depth between 20 and 45 km. One of the nodal planes of the focal mechanism of the Manaca earthquake, as well as the centroid location coincides with the aftershock locations trend, supporting the hypothesis that a nearby steeply dipping sinistral strike-slip fault originated this event. Earthquake locations and focal mechanism analyses of collected data from global and local earthquake catalogs suggest that the strong coupling caused by the subduction of the Cocos Ridge and Nazca plate is largely accommodated by outer arc crustal block migration with a combination of NW-SE sinistral and N-S dextral strike-slip faults deforming the overriding Panama Microplate. Sinistral motion of crustal blocks, on the Costa Rica side, are consistent with observed motions along with the Azuero-Sona fault system and Coiba Faults on the Panamanian side.
•Our results show a reactivation of an existing deeper crustal faults at the southern border between Costa Rica and Panama.•Subduction of the Cocos plate and its assiciated ridge is the dominant tectonic force in SE Costa Rica.•The subduction of the Cocos Ridge is reflected in the overlying continental Panama Microplate as active crustal faults.•An integrative state-of-the-art tectonic model is presented for the southern Costa Rica – Panama border region.
