Missal's work is the latest nugget of a rich vein tapped in 1993 by Amy Kaplan's call for linking cultural analysis to the history of US imperialism. He asks why those who wrote about the Panama Canal – and by extension the American people – were so fascinated and argues that the building of the canal symbolized nothing less than a vision for the future of America. In an age of anxious modernization and brutal imperialism, the canal provided a “vision of progress” that showcased the progressive “search for order” – abroad (3).

The book focusses mostly on the “Panama authors,” promoters of the Canal who “constructed” it figuratively by championing the American ideals it represented. The most important of these was President Theodore Roosevelt, who showed that promotion was a force in itself and that the domestic audience was crucial. In 1906, as muckrakers exposed the disease and corruption rampant in the project, “TR” made the first-ever foreign trip by a sitting President and staged his journey to the canal to maximize the positive aspects of the construction and the impression that the President's will was enough to “make the dirt fly,” as his new chief engineer George Goethals commanded. Goethals's appointment was the real turning point in the project, but Roosevelt's belief in the canal's imagery mattered.

Such imagery conveyed, above all, a utopian model of American society. The successful battle against diseased mosquitoes, for instance, made the tropics suitable for whites, previously unthinkable by social Darwinists. Martial metaphors also expressed the ideal: the collective, government-led campaign to blast through the continent was a “war-like effort” that stood as “the modern cure for a society threatened by excessive individualism and lacking manly resolve” (75). The ultimate celebration came during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Influenced by Robert Rydell, Missal dissects its myriad meanings, culminating in a five-acre reproduction of the Canal Zone. The massive miniature was “literally a model for the future” (191, original emphasis).

Linking all these images was the idea of the “cooperative society” (141). The Panama authors were most excited by the efficiency of the canal government and the (apparent) generous treatment of the workers. Canal society was orderly, suburban, and peaceful, and reproduced the era's ideal gender division and racial segregation. This despite the fact that it was autocratic, socialistic, and temporary, and supported entirely by taxpayers. Yet Missal never tackles the key contradiction: how could the canal be an American “model” if one of the very ideals of American society was not collectivism but individualism? Perhaps greater attention to the criticisms of the canal would have helped shine a light on the issue.

Similar to Mary Renda's Taking Haiti, the book uses methods proper to American studies, namely discourse analysis and the examination of cultural products. The most original chapter deals with the visual representations of the Canal, placed in the context of the day's innovations in photography. We are reminded that picture postcards and stereographs of the Canal were enormously popular at the time and that their impact on viewers' consciousness simply cannot be reproduced today. Missal also argues that official government photographs of Canal sites emphasized order, symmetry, and the triumph of American ingenuity over nature. They also tended to exclude laborers.

Among the book's weak points is its “dissertation” feel. Its literature review brings little that is new to specialists in American studies. It spends too much time on discussing “expansionists” such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Frederick Jackson Turner, which will be equally old news to historians of US imperialism since it was done forty-five years ago by Walter LaFeber in The New Empire.

Nevertheless, the domestic focus adds to the historiography of the canal in that most historians, from J. Michael Hogan to John Major to Alfredo Castillero Calvo, have focussed on the international aspects of the relationship. Missal successfully links his findings to broader trends in US domestic cultural history, such as the search for masculine endeavors and the belief in technology and social engineering. In so doing he serves historians and scholars of cultural studies by fully inserting the Panama Canal into the international tale of the progressive era.

Unfortunately, Missal's book has already been upstaged by Julie Greene's far more ambitious The Canal Builders, which not only covers most of Missal's arguments and does it more efficiently, but is also a far more comprehensive look at the building of the canal from the point of view of the multinational workforce.