This professional development institute, directed by Professor Frank Robinson, will examine the Panama Canal, providing a context and a lens through which to examine the following: the history of Spanish America and Central America, United States-Latin American relations, maritime commerce, the engineering marvels of the canal’s excavation and lock design/operation, the medical and scientific struggle against malaria and yellow fever, the migration of Afro-West Indians to Panama for the railroad and canal, life for North Americans in the Canal Zone, and, in a larger context, lessons that speak to the geopolitics between small and powerful nations.

This summer institute will show that the construction of the Panama Canal, along with being an unprecedented feat of engineering, was a profoundly important historic event with worldwide repercussions. It affected the lives of people at every level of society and of virtually every race and nationality.