THE BIG DITCH

August 15, 1914. A small steamer named the Ancon eased into a chamber of gray concrete the size of a city block — and the two great oceans of the world were joined for the first time in history. The journey to that moment had taken sixty-four years, two failed European empires, a French bankruptcy that ruined a generation of investors, a U.S.-sponsored revolution, and the lives of more than twenty-five thousand workers buried in the mud of the isthmus. By the time the Ancon cleared the final lock, the canal had cost more than any project in American history, transformed the geography of global trade, and announced to the world that a new imperial power had arrived. But the story most Americans inherited — of plucky engineers, of Theodore Roosevelt's swagger, of yellow fever conquered and a continent split — has always been only half the story. The other half belongs to the Barbadian and Jamaican workers paid in silver while Americans were paid in gold, to a Colombian province annexed by gunboat diplomacy, to a Panamanian nation that spent the next ninety years trying to claw back what was taken from it, and to a small French lobbyist whose theatrical use of a postage stamp may have rerouted the canal itself. The Big Ditch tells the definitive story of the Panama Canal — the engineering, the empire, the disease, the diplomacy, and the cost. Drawing on archives in Washington, Panama City, Bridgetown, and Kingston, Dorothy Louise Stanhope reconstructs the canal's full arc, from de Lesseps' doomed dream in 1880 to the handover at noon on December 31, 1999. This is history as it actually happened — ambitious, brutal, brilliant, and impossible to put down. Perfect for readers of David McCullough's The Path Between the Seas, Stephen Ambrose's narrative histories, and Erik Larson's deeply researched true-life epics.