Word: canals
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Seas looks back with frank admiration on the men and machines that toiled 44 years to join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans at the Isthmus of Panama. Historian David McCullough, 44, author of The Johnstown Flood and The Great Bridge, skirts such contemporary controversies as U.S. control over the Canal Zone. There is matter enough for him in history. The isthmus belonged to Colombia until 1903, when the U.S., under Teddy Roosevelt, encouraged a local revolt and sent American warships to block the landing of Colombian troops. Congressional doves objected to the gunboat diplomacy, but they were drowned...
...then open to buy up the holdings and rights of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, a bankrupt French company that had tried-under the guidance of Ferdinand de Lesseps, supervisor of the Suez Canal project-to trench the 50 miles between the seas. By the time the C.U.C.I. folded in 1889, it had spent $287 million dollars and the lives of some 20,000 Frenchmen and Chinese, Irish and West Indian laborers. The chief killers, as generations of schoolchildren have been told, were malaria and yellow fever...
...isthmus became known as "De Lesseps' graveyard." A bloc in the U.S. Senate urged a new canal site in Nicaragua-a longer but healthier route. The Panama lobby won out, partly on the argument that Nicaragua had too many active volcanoes. With the payment of $10 million to Panama and $40 million to the defunct French company, the U.S. entered into the most expensive peacetime undertaking in its 128-year history. The final bill was $352 million...
Author McCullough describes the building of the canal as if it were a war. Its best-remembered hero was Colonel George Washington Goethals, chief overseer of the project, but equal credit must go to William Gorgas, the Army doctor who wiped out the disease-carrying mosquitoes, and John Stevens, a rough, amiable Westerner who refused to start digging until there were adequate warehouses, railroad facilities, housing and hospitals...
More than a half-century later, many of the canal builders' superhuman achievements can seem routine. Yet one thing that may have been routine at the beginning of the century is now clearly incomprehensible: the canal was completed six months ahead of schedule and below the estimated cost. This massive excavation of the past brims with such evidence of how far we have progressed-and regressed-in six decades. As he so skillfully did in his book about the Brooklyn Bridge, McCullough seldom fails to make the reader feel like a sidewalk superintendent of history...