Thursday, Nov. 14, 2019, 7:30 PM at Levis Faculty Center IPRH Lecture Hall.

One of the most important achievements of the U.S. era of canal building in Panama (1904-1914) was the successful control of yellow fever, a disease that had plagued the American tropics for centuries and had undone the French canal building effort two decades earlier. Indeed, many US commentators depicted the successful control of yellow fever as a form of tropical conquest made possible by the recent mosquito vector discovery. But far from being a form of environmental conquest, yellow fever control was in fact a process of reengineering urban Panama and of disciplining an urban Panamanian population that was largely immune to the disease, all so that white outsiders could successful complete a massive engineering project. Find out more here.