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To many, Theodore Roosevelt was an exemplar of manliness and “muscular Christianity” and an exceptional public servant who led a crusade for social justice. To others, the sage of Oyster Bay was a jingoist, a nativist, a hot-tempered, unpredictable manic, and an egomaniac who put his own interests above America’s good. Roosevelt highly valued biblical morality and considered it vital to personal and public life, including politics. He downplayed doctrine and theological differences and strongly stressed the importance of good works and character. Many contemporaries called him a preacher of righteousness, and he labeled the presidency a bully pulpit, which he used to trumpet the importance of social justice, civility, and virtue. Three religious issues caused considerable controversy during Roosevelt’s tenure in office: his attempt to remove “In God We Trust” from some coins, the “Dear Maria” affair, and concerns about William Howard Taft’s Unitarianism during the 1908 presidential campaign. Christianity, especially the version espoused by turn-of-the-century Social Gospelers, played a significant role in shaping his philosophy of government. Roosevelt’s role in mediating the 1902 anthracite coal strike, “taking” Panama to build an isthmus canal, and promoting conservation illustrate how his religious commitments helped shape his policies.

A profound sense of place resonates throughout Carr's writings. Just as he constructed lasting images of Florida, that sense of Florida shaped Carr. No matter how far he traveled, Carr remained devoted to Florida's landscapes and wildlife. In his writings and conservation efforts, Carr worked to preserve the natural history of Florida, including the Everglades, Payne's Prairie, and Lake Alice. As their children reached the age of independence, Marjorie Carr was free to pursue her own passion for conservation. In addition to her important contributions to Archie's research at Tortuguero, she led the fight to save the Ocklawaha. Each of the Carr's five children recalls vibrant conversations around the dinner table about the future of Florida's wildlands and wildlife. Just as their time in Honduras had cemented their relationship, Archie and Marjorie Carr's joint and independent efforts for the conservation of Florida defined their unique relationship and collaboration.

American astronomer Percival Lowell adopted Schiaparelli’s canali and used them in his theories about Mars, its irrigation canals, and its advanced civilization. Lowell built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and spent the last two decades of his life observing and mapping the Martian landscape, refining his theories about the planet, and writing four popular books on Mars. A firm believer in the existence of Martian canals, Lowell refused to accept the work of distinguished astronomers that contradicted his theories. Lowell’s view of Mars finally found its niche in popular culture, notably science fiction. In part, Lowell’s popularity stemmed from the fact that his conception of Mars resonated with the American experience in the late 19th and early 20th century.

This chapter covers the technical but essential subject of artificial irrigation and the control of water. In a land where rainfall is scarce, controlling canals and water distribution is one of the keys to State power, and by and large the Russians were ineffective at doing so. On the face of it, with their vast expansion of irrigation in Punjab, the British were much more successful, but they too had difficulty controlling pre-existing networks.

In the early 1970s, a team of scientists of the Geological Survey of Israel, while working in the Sinai Peninsula during Israel's occupation of the territory east of the Suez Canal, discovered the remains of what they believed was a canal that ran along Egypt's border with the Sinai. Aerial photography and on-site study led to this identification by the leaders of the team, Amihai Sneh and Tuvia Weissbrod. The close relationship between the Fortress of Tjaru and the canal supports the hypothesis that the canal had a defensive purpose as an extensive moat. If indeed a canal existed along Egypt's border with Sinai during the New Kingdom, and the evidence does support this view, it seems logical to conclude that it would have been an impediment to the Israelites in their Exodus from Egypt. A number of intriguing questions remain to be answered about the Eastern Frontier Canal.

This chapter details Hardwar’s mundane history, gleaned from multiple sources. For centuries, Hardwar’s primary attraction was a spring bathing festival—which has drawn larger numbers for the Kumbha Mela at least since the late 1600s—but this pattern shifted late in the 1700s. During the early nineteenth century, the Hardwar fair (the bathing festival) was also north India’s largest marketplace, creating unprecedented wealth. Later, the Upper Ganges Canal and the railroads radically altered Hardwar’s local and religious environment. Each major change also generated conflict—whether between the warrior ascetic bands (akharas) that battled for control over Hardwar’s rich marketplace, or for control over Hardwar between local elites and a colonial administration worried that festivals were breeding grounds for cholera epidemics. The most important struggle came in 1914–17, when Hindu groups led by Madan Mohan Malaviya forced the British to modify plans to dam the Ganges.

This chapter discusses the information provided by the Hutton Report and the Butler Report concerning the bases of the British government's decision to join the U.S. in overturning Saddam Hussein for his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It suggests that nothing revealed in the reports could bring an agreement to whether British Prime Minister Tony Blair was right in his decision, but those who have read the reports could surely conclude that the government, the intelligence services, and the BBC fell short of what have been expected of them at a time when Britain was on the brink of being taken into a war. It discusses the similarities between the Iraq War and the Suez Canal conflict.

This chapter explores the Christian village experiment. Brand new villages, constructed by the missions on land reclaimed through canal irrigation in western Punjab, offered missionaries control of the natural, socio-economic, and religious environment in engineering the ideal Christian communities of the future. Free now of old, oppressive village ties that they had once hoped simply to re-negotiate, the small numbers of converts who moved to the new villages had high expectations of their own. In particular, the CMS village of Clarkabad and the Capuchin village of Maryabad had the potential finally to stretch the mission-convert relationship to breaking point.

This chapter examines long-term institutional changes in the Senate committee system that devalued committee work and negatively affected the total hearing activity of Armed Services and Foreign Relations. It begins with a review of expectations and measures regarding the influence of the shifting institutional context on Senate committee hearings in general and on Armed Services and Foreign Relations sessions in particular. It then analyzes the effects of various long-term changes on the frequency of public hearings first by Senate committees in the aggregate and then by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. It also considers the influences on the frequency of executive hearing days by the two national security committees. Finally, it looks at the Panama Canal to illustrate the confluence of trends that created a watershed moment for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

This chapter examines the ambitious but ill-fated French project for a canal across Panama, and the ways that the engineering challenge was encoded in what one commentator called “glory for the country and a touch of romance.” By following the dreams of universal commerce and brotherhood that were attached to the project, many registers of French emotionalism are explored. In Panama, romantic Jesuit ruins, utopian jungle communities, and attractive isthmian peoples illuminate French Saint Simonian communities of love plotting to conquer the Pacific transit with a passionate Gallic nationalism.

This chapter turns to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to demonstrate command and disarray in the way that city meets river. It describes how threats from nature become part of the social-political apparatus—with the Katrina disaster the unhappy result. It has become rather common to observe that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster,” and Katrina is surely a poster child for that assertion. Much of the history of the New Orleans area was a kind Katrina in the making. Building levees, canals, and other infrastructural elements for the sake of safety yielded eventual mayhem. The chapter traces out some of the details of the “downward precautionary spiral.” Each effort at a fix leads to a successive effort of the same sort, accumulating not as a series of individual safety features but as vulnerability to events of catastrophic proportion.

Although María Josepha Lina de la Canal received the money to establish the La Purísima Concepción convent in San Miguel el Grande as inheritance upon her parents' death, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities assured that the convent was not constructed under grief-induced haste as María Josepha Lina was just finishing what her father, Manuel Tomás de la Canal, had started. While María Josepha Lina was to become the first novice of the convent, several early accounts showed almost contradictory statements about her true character towards her parents and the convent. The “official” version of the biography by Díaz de Gamarra points out that Father Alfaro, María Josepha Lina's confessor, “directed” that the convent be established while also recognizing María Josepha Lina's religiosity and obligation to her parents as motivations.

The available statistics show that there was a sharp acceleration of the growth of British industrial output, investment, and trade in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, justifying the general use of the expression ‘Industrial Revolution’ and refuting the efforts of a few historians to deny its very occurrence.

In particular, the extraordinarily rapid growth of output and exports of the cotton industry was widely remarked upon both at the time and ever since, and was generally and plausibly attributed to a series of inventions and innovations, which increased productivity per hour of work by more than an order of magnitude and made possible rapidly descending costs and prices.

Only a little less rapid was the growth of the British iron industry, its rate of technical change, and its widening range of applications throughout the economy.

These exceptionally dynamic industries made an outstanding contribution to the growth of the economy as a whole based on water‐powered mechanization and a new transport infrastructure of canals, rivers, and roads.

Finally, British leadership in the Industrial Revolution must be attributed not only to these changes in technology and in the economy but also to the confluence and congruence of these changes with developments in the political and cultural subsystems particularly favourable to science, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Speculation about extraterrestrial life continued in the 19th century, as did the development of the telescope by Sir William Herschel and others. The discovery of the moons of Mars by Asaph Hall in 1877 drew attention to that planet. Thereafter, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed Mars closely and became convinced its landscape contained canali (natural or artificial channels). Schiaparelli mapped Martian canali and speculated that they were irrigation canals built by a great Martian civilization.

NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars in the 1960s and 1970s returned images of a cratered Mars with no signs of Lowell’s canals or life of any kind. However, Martian life as well as Martian civilization found a new champion in Carl Sagan, a planetary astronomer and popularizer of science. Sagan and Iosif Shkovskii’s book, Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), argued for the existence of a long-dead Martian civilization and proposed a rationale and program for the search for intelligent, civilized life in the universe. Sagan scoffed at Lowell’s Martian canals, yet Sagan’s claims that civilized life was abundant in the universe initially gained few supporters at NASA or in the scientific community. Like Lowell, Sagan sought a popular following by arguing repeatedly and eloquently that the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life was in our grasp.

This chapter sketches an overall picture of the pilgrimage from the Indian subcontinent and outlines the broad trends and changes that occurred within the period under study. It compares the colonial government's stand on internal Hindu pilgrimages and the Haj. It shows how the pilgrimage underwent a massive transformation due to technological breakthroughs such as the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which represented a huge watershed in the world of marine navigation. The canal not only ‘joined the East and the West’ but also allowed European shipping companies to operate in Asian territories, as a result of which the Haj traffic became a potential source of commercial profit for these companies. The opening of the Suez Canal also marked the point where the perceived great medical threat presented by the pilgrims to European nations emerged, due to which quarantines had to be imposed.

At the coming of peace in 1945, the reputation of Reuters as a general news agency stood high. In the succeeding decades, the task of Reuter journalists and managers was to maintain and to develop that reputation. The Second World War had been easy to report on as it was usually obvious which were the big war stories to follow, whereas in peacetime correspondents required much more effort to seek out unanticipated and preferably exclusive stones. The way Reuters reported the Anglo-French landings in the Suez Canal zone demonstrated strikingly to the world that, after a century as a national and imperial institution, the old agency was ceasing to be the news agency of the British Empire. Its Suez reporting showed that Reuters no longer wanted to be a channel for writing the news from the British point of view and instead it was developing a supranational attitude.

In 1600, Ricci attempted once more to reach Beijing, Accompanied by Diego de Pantoja, a Spanish Jesuit, he travelled north on the Grand Canal. En route, the Jesuits, on their mission as tribute‐bearers, were intercepted by the eunuch Ma Tang. After escaping from Ma's clutches, Ricci successfully negotiated the bureaucracy in Beijing and obtained permission to reside. This chapter describes the circle of his friends and acquaintances in the imperial capital. As customary, Ricci depended on his friendship and the goodwill of powerful mandarins for his success. A special relationship developed between Feng Yinjing, a loyal and just official imprisoned for opposing eunuch corruption, and the Jesuit missionary, who continued publishing works in Chinese, introducing Stoic and Christian texts to the Ming elites.