HW Panama Canal
1. The U.S. acquired the Panama Canal by paying Columbia twenty five million dollars for Panama’s independence. Theodore Roosevelt bought panamas independence but immediately gave control over the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. He pushed congress into allowing his foreign policies. the Panamanians felt that it gave them a chance for their economy to do something, it gave them plenty of jobs and a major water way to toll people.
2. The canal was needed so that there was ocean traveled trying to get from the east coast to west coast. Making this shortcut through panama cut the traveling distance in half, because you didn’t have to go around the tip of South America. There were other routes and those routes were called Drake Passage and Cape Horn. This is where the two major oceans collided, the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.
3. The people who help build the canal were just everyday workers who came to labor at the canal. Predominately the workers were from the United States but as work continued more came from Panama, Asia, Europe, and West Indies. People of the West Indies believed that this work would bring them from rags to riches. One tragic event that happened was that a lot of the workers had caught tropical diseases that were killing them. Those disease included yellow fever, and malaria which proved to be set backs in the building of the canal.
4. The canal