Eric Rutkow. The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas.

Abstract

It is remarkable that no monograph has ever been written on the Pan-American Highway, the longest road in the world, almost uninterrupted from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. This especially when the other massive US engineering project in Latin America, the Panama Canal, has attracted countless histories. The historiography of highway design in the Americas is still in its infancy; Eric Rutkow’s The Longest Line on the Map stands as a significant contribution to it. Rutkow asks why so many were intent on building an explicitly international ground transportation network. Implicit in his question is that nations could have instead built their own routes to their borders or to the sea. The answer lies in the symbolism of the highway as “the material embodiment of Pan-Americanism”: not merely a path to move goods and people across the Americas but also a token of shared interests (3). US citizens largely conceived...