Word: canale
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...Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal By Julie Greene 475 pages; The Penguin Press...
...workers braved illness and misadventure to carve a 50-mile long channel through the Panamanian isthmus to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But for University of Maryland history professor Julie Greene, the project was about more than miles dug or dirt shifted. "We have long perceived the canal as involving conquest over nature, and there's some truth in that. But it also involved conquest over the tens of thousands of men and women in the Canal Zone and in the Republic of Panama." And so Greene focuses her account of the Panama Canal's construction on the eponymous...
...great diversity of peoples who worked on the Canal: "Although most [non white-American] employees came from the Caribbean, many traveled to the Canal Zone from southern Europe, from India and from other parts of Latin America. The 1912 census included as employees of the [Isthmian Canal Commission] or the Panama Railroad one thousand Panamanians, eight hundred Italians, thirteen hundred Greeks, thirty-five hundred Spaniards, and smaller numbers of East Indians, Portuguese, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Colombians, Mexicans, Hondurans, Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans...
...more unique perks of working on the canal: "The ultimate souvenir, however, was a shark tooth. Occasionally canal workers would find one in the dirt dislodged by dynamite, a souvenir from millions of years past when the two oceans were still connected. Such a lucky canal worker would then mount the tooth and wear it proudly on a black watch fob. Reginald Beckford, who worked for a time in a jeweler's shop, remembered mounting many shark teeth for West Indian clients...
...undergo a more expensive procedure. "It's human nature to say, 'I can't afford that right now, and if it doesn't hurt, I don't have a problem,'" says Dr. Lawrence Spindel, a dentist in New York City. "Then all of a sudden you need a root canal...