M arixa L asso . Erased

Marixa Lasso’s Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal is the first book written by a Panamanian historian to focus on the period of the US construction of the Panama Canal. A strikingly original study, it provides a novel vantage point on US intervention in Panama from 1903 to 1916, as well as its impact and legacies, and in so doing makes powerful arguments about neocolonialism and modernity. It concentrates on the creation of the Canal Zone—that is, the landscape extending five miles on either side of the Panama Canal for fifty miles, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The triumphalist US narrative lauded the construction of the canal as the great symbol of Western modernity, US engineering and medical achievement, and the conquest of nature. At the same time, it portrayed the 550-square-mile Canal Zone as a hot, virtually uninhabitable jungle where the US erected modern, well-ordered company...

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · CONQUEST · Genealogy · Jungle · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Panama · Panama canal · Political science · Symbol (formal) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies