Panama Canal

• Panama Canal Workers
• January 27, 2013Fall 2007, Vol. 39, No. 3 Looking for an Ancestor in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904–1914 By Robert Ellis The Panama Canal, ca. 1900–1914. The canal was 10 miles wide and about 50 miles long. (106-RC-129) In 10 years, between 1904 and 1914, the United States mounted and completed one of the most massive construction projects in history—the building of the Panama Canal. To create this ribbon of water between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the Isthmus Canal Commission excavated 232 million cubic feet of soil. Manpower was the key to success. It wasn’t long before the area that became known as the Panama Canal Zone—10 miles wide and about 50…READ MORE Research HistoryComments Offon Panama Canal Workers
• MEDICINETropical Diseases and the Construction of the Panama Canal, 1904–1914
• April 13, 2011The Mosquito: Its Relation to Disease and Its Extermination. From the holdings of Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine—Harvard Medical School. The Hay–Bunau–Varilla Treaty of 1903 created the Panama Canal Zone and allowed the US government to begin building its 51–mile waterway through the Isthmus of Panama in May 1904. The transoceanic waterway opened in 1914, approximately four centuries after Charles I, King of Spain, conceived of a waterway across the Isthmus to facilitate Spain’s colonial interests in the New World. In constructing the Panama Canal, American planners and builders faced challenges that went far beyond politics and engineering. The deadly endemic diseases of yellow fever and malaria were dangerous…READ MORE0 Comments
•  Workers on the Panama Canal
• April 3, 2011The Workers In the decade-long American effort to construct the Panama Canal, tens of thousands of laborers   Panama Canal Museum Canal laborers head to work worked, sacrificed and died while building the largest canal the world had seen to date. Combating harsh terrain, disease, and deplorable living conditions, workers from around the world held a variety of different jobs in the canal zone, their pay and quality of life often directly related to their ethnicity. Long before the U.S. attempt at building the Panama Canal began in 1904, workers from around the world had been coming to the isthmus. In the early 1850s, the Panama Railroad Company imported thousands…READ MORE0 Comments
•  Panama Canal
• February 27, 2011With Panama gaining it’s independence in the fall of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt appoints a seven man commission to complete the construction of the canal on February 29th, 1904.