American Antiquarian Society
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Jessica M. Lepler tells the captivating story of a little-known quest in the 1820s 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 unexplored Central American forests into the world’s first global waterway. Although the idea of literally changing the world by connecting the oceans proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolutions, the pursuit itself changed history. Canal dreams prompted political transformations, financial crisis, recognition of new countries, concern about climate change, and more.
Drawing from her new book, Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions (2025), Lepler weaves an absorbing narrative of adventure, corruption, far-reaching consequences, and present-day parallels. Cutting through two centuries, she reveals 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. Her new book Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions was published in 2025. In 2023-2024, she served as Central American Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Her first book The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (2013) won the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Lepler was a Hench Post-Dissertation Fellows at AAS in 2008-9.