The Canal Builders

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A revelatory look at a momentous undertaking-from the workers’ point of view

The Panama Canal has long been celebrated as a triumph of American engineering and ingenuity. In The Canal Builders, Julie Greene reveals that this emphasis has obscured a far more remarkable element of the historic enterprise: the tens of thousands of workingmen and workingwomen who traveled from all around the world to build it. Greene looks past the mythology surrounding the canal to expose the difficult working conditions and discriminatory policies involved in its construction. Drawing extensively on letters, memoirs, and government documents, the book chronicles both the struggles and the triumphs of the workers and their fami­lies. Prodigiously researched and vividly told, The Canal Builders explores the human dimensions of one of the world’s greatest labor mobilizations, and reveals how it launched America’s twentieth-century empire.Julie Greene is a professor of history at the University of Maryland whose area of research is labor in the United States, immigration, and empire. She and historian Ira Berlin cofounded and now codirect the Center for Global Migration Studies at the University of Maryland, which is dedicated to generating knowledge of the history and politics of global migrations. Greene is the author of The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal, which was awarded the James A. Rawley Prize for the best book on the history of race relations by the Organization of American Historians.US

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