From the award-winning author of American Canopy, a dazzling account of the world’s longest road, the Pan-American Highway, and the epic quest to link North and South America, a dramatic story of commerce, technology, politics, and the divergent fates of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Pan-American Highway, monument to a century’s worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save the mythic Darien Gap that straddles Panama and Colombia. The highway’s history, however, has long remained a mystery, a story scattered among government archives, private papers, and fading memories. In contrast to the Panama Canal and its vast literature, the Pan-American Highway—the United States’ other great twentieth-century hemispheric infrastructure project—has become an orphan of the past, effectively erased from the story of the “American Century.” The Longest Line on the Map uncovers this incredible tale for the first time and weaves it into a tapestry that fascinates, informs, and delights. Rutkow’s narrative forces the reader to take seriously the question: Why couldn’t the Americas have become a single region that “is” and not two near irreconcilable halves that “are”? Whether you’re fascinated by the history of the Americas, or you’ve dreamed of driving around the globe, or you simply love world records and the stories behind them, The Longest Line on the Map is a riveting narrative, a lost epic of hemispheric scale.

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Traces the history of Argentine and Chilean pan-Americanism and asks why pan-Americanism came to define inter-American relations in the twentieth century. The Southern Cone and the Origins of Pan America, 1888-1933 offers new perspectives on the origins of the inter-American system and the history of international cooperation in the Americas. Mark J. Petersen chronicles the story of pan-Americanism, a form of regionalism launched by the United States in the 1880s and long associated with U.S. imperial pretensions in the Western hemisphere. The story begins and ends in the Río de la Plata, with Southern Cone actors and Southern Cone agendas at the fore. Incorporating multiple strands of pan-American history, Petersen draws inspiration from interdisciplinary analysis of recent regionalisms and weaves together research from archives in Argentina, Chile, the United States, and Uruguay. The result is a nuanced and comprehensive account of how Southern Cone policy makers used pan-American cooperation as a vehicle for various agendas--personal, national, regional, hemispheric, and global--transforming pan-Americanism from a tool of U.S. interests to a framework for multilateral cooperation that persists to this day. Petersen decenters the story of pan-Americanism and orients the conversation on pan-Americanism toward a more complete understanding of hemispheric cooperation. The book will appeal to students and scholars of inter-American relations, Latin American (especially Chile and Argentina) and U.S. history, Latin American studies, and international relations.