Eric Rutkow, "The Longest Line on the Map The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas" (Scribner, 2019)

New Books in American Studies · Nov 5, 2020 · 52m

In his book The Longest Line on the Map The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas (Scribner, 2019), Professor Eric Rutkow retraces the fascinating, decades-long history of the attempt to build the world’s longest highway. This seemingly chimerical project coincided with the era of Pan-Americanism, a 19th and 20th century movement that advanced a rhetoric of solidarity between the nations of the Western hemisphere. Rutkow’s critical account provides a new angle on the history of Pan-Americanism and US-Latin American relations by offering both a materialist…