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In her new book “” (UNC Press, 2025), associate professor of history Jessica Lepler tells the story of a little-known quest to unite the world by building a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Central American isthmus. With dreams substituting for data, an international cast of politicians, lawyers, philosophers, and capitalists sent competing agents on a race to transform Lake Nicaragua, the San Juan River, and the terra incognita of Central American forests into the world’s first global waterway.

“In the 1820s, almost a century before the opening of the Panama Canal,  Nicaragua looked a more promising site for the world’s greatest oceanic shortcut. The San Juan River runs from Lake Nicaragua, one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes, to the Caribbean Sea,” says Lepler. “Although the canal was not constructed, the quest’s consequences contribute to the world today.”