LaFeber on the Panama Canal

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Legendary Cornell history professor emeritus Walter LaFeber appears in "Panama Canal," a new film airing on PBS Jan. 24.

The Panama Canal opened August 15, 1914, connecting the two largest oceans, after more than a decade of work, an outlay of more than $350 million - the largest single federal expenditure in history to that time - and the loss of more than 5,000 lives.

The cast of historical characters includes Theodore Roosevelt, who saw the canal as the embodiment of American might and ingenuity; Col. William Gorgas, an army doctor whose revolutionary public health campaign all but eradicated Yellow Fever; and visionary engineers who solved the problem of cutting a 50-mile long slice through mountains and jungle.

The 90-minute film also looks at the lives of the thousands of workers, rigidly segregated by race. In the Canal Zone, skilled positions were reserved for white workers while a predominantly West Indian workforce did backbreaking manual labor. Using archival photographs and footage, rare interviews with canal workers and firsthand accounts of life in the zone, the film tells the story of one of the world's most daring technological achievements.