The longest line on the map: the United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the quest to link the Americas

摘要

In The longest line on the map, Eric Rutkow recounts in lively fashion-and with a predominant emphasis on the role of personalities rather than impersonal factors- the slowly maturing US ambition in the nineteenth century to forge a hemisphere-long transport corridor for self-serving commercial and geopolitical reasons. This ambition was partially fulfilled by means of a variety of privately built railroads between the 1880s and 1920s, and subsequently almost completely in the form of the Pan-American Highway that today runs-with the exception of a sixty-mile gap in Darien on the Panama-Colombia border-from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. US-driven construction and majority funding of the Inter-American Highway between Guatemala and Panama, Rutkow avers, constitutes the largest foreign development project ever undertaken by the United States-aside from the Panama Canal-and represents, along with the earlier Pan-American Railway, 'the material embodiment of Pan-Americanism' (p. 3).