Dig deeper than the Canal — find the people who built it

If you've ever looked at a photograph of the Panama Canal and felt like something — or someone — was missing from the frame, you already know why this course exists.

I built The Canal Builders because the standard telling of this story has a hole in it the size of an ocean. The engineering gets celebrated. The geopolitics get analyzed. And the tens of thousands of Black Caribbean workers who made the whole thing physically possible — most of them Barbadian, many of them the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of enslaved people — get a footnote, if they're mentioned at all. That has always bothered me. History that erases the people who did the work isn't really history. It's myth-making with a budget.

What I wanted to create was something different: a course that starts where these workers' stories actually start — in West Africa, before the ships, before the auctions, before any of it — and follows a continuous human thread all the way through to the descendants living in Panama today. That means we spend real time in Barbados: understanding Bajan dialect and food and music and faith, understanding what emancipation actually did and didn't change, understanding the economic pressures that made a recruitment contract for dangerous work in a foreign jungle look like a reasonable bet. We don't just explain the migration. We make you feel why it happened.

When we get to the Canal Zone, we don't skip over the hard parts. The Gold Roll and Silver Roll — the racial payroll system that codified exactly what the American project thought Black workers were worth — is examined in full. The digging, the dynamite, the disease, the death tolls. We work with primary sources and photographs, and I'll show you how to read them: what they confirm, what they leave uncertain, and how honest historians navigate that line. You'll come away from this course not just knowing more history, but knowing how to think about history — especially the kind that gets buried.

And then — because this story doesn't end with the Canal's opening in 1914 — we follow the builders' descendants into the communities they created in Panama, into the cultural traditions they transplanted and transformed, and into the archives and family records where their names are still waiting to be found. Whether you're tracing your own family tree or simply trying to understand a chapter of the Atlantic world that shaped the hemisphere we live in, there is something here for you.

I believe history taught through people's names and lives and choices is the only kind that really sticks. I've tried to build a course worthy of the people it's about. Come learn with me — they deserve to be known.