American Antiquarian Society
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In the 1820s, there was a little-known quest to unite the world by building a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Central American isthmus. As Spanish American nations declared independence and new canals intensified US expansion and British industrialization, many imagined the construction of an interoceanic canal as predestined. With dreams substituting for data, an international cast of politicians, lawyers, philosophers, and capitalists sent competing agents on a race to transform Lake Nicaragua, the San Juan River, and the terra incognita of Central American forests into the world’s first global waterway. Jessica M. Lepler tells the captivating story of this global journey in Canal Dreamers. Although the idea of literally changing the world by connecting the oceans proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolutions, the quest itself changed history. Canal dreams prompted political transformations, financial crisis, recognition of new countries, concern about climate change, and more. Full of adventure, corruption, far-reaching consequences, and present-day parallels, Lepler’s absorbing narrative cuts through two centuries, revealing that dreams do not need to come true to make history.
Jessica M. Lepler is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. In 2025, she received an Excellence in Teaching Award for her work in courses about early American history, history of capitalism, historical methods, professionalization, and history of animals. Also in 2025, the University of North Carolina Press published her second book Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions. In 2023-2024, she served as Central American Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, her first book The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis won the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She fondly remembers her time spent under the generous dome as a Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.