Many of our presumptions about the Panama Canal Zone are wrong; it was not carved out of uninhabited jungle, the creation of Lake Gatún did not flood towns and force them to move, people living in the zone prior to the construction of the canal were not out of step with modernity. In her new book Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal(Harvard University Press, 2019), argues compellingly that the construction of the Panama Canal prompted the destruction of a bustling network of towns, along with the livelihoods and democratic traditions of their inhabitants.

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