Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Vanness, and every week I sit down for a gorgeous

conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Professor Keisha Corinialdi, where I ask her,

what's the story of the Panama Canal?

Welcome to Getting Curious, this is Jonathan Vanness, I'm so excited for this week's episode,

I'm so excited for this week's guest, so without any further ado, welcome to the show,

Keisha Corinialdi, who is an assistant professor at Emerson College and an interdisciplinary

historian of modern empires, migration, gender, and activism in the Americas. And before we dive in,

I realized I live really close to a dam, and then I was like, what is going on with dams,

like what's going on with like water stuff. So we just had our first kind of learning experience

with like dams and kind of like the economic, the environmental, the displacement, all of the

different factors that kind of go into what we know as dams. And then I was like, what about the

Panama Canal? And so here we are, welcome, how are you? I'm good, thanks for having me, and I'm

excited that you've got excited to learn about the Panama Canal, that's, you know, all that I hope

to be able to engender in my own students. So yay! You got me, and I'm not even like, I'm like

a, I'm one of your students of life now. So that's fun. I love it. So let's start with the big

heavy-hitting questions. Where is the Panama Canal? Love it. So it is on Panama, the panemy,

and ismets. And it was selected for its very unique geography, right, which was something that

going back to the 16th century from those sort of traveling at that point in time, there was this

realization that this strip of land connected two major land masses and two huge bodies of ocean,

the Pacific and the Atlantic and then the North and the South. So kind of like the trifecta

of like where can you build something that could connect more of the world. And it sort of began at

...