Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal by Ashley Carse (review)

467 analyzed in interesting ways, for example when Kevin J. James discusses the horse-drawn Irish jaunting car in the context of mid-eighteenthto earlytwentieth-century tourism. Walking and cycling, however, receive only the briefest of mentions and are not analyzed systematically. Meanwhile, the idea of motor travel as the norm of modern personal mobility goes largely unexamined, although the role of car ownership and use is discussed both in relation to gender equality in America (Margaret Walsh) and individual freedom under the communist regime in Romania (Adelina Stefan). An important combining force for the chapters is the framing of mobility as material culture. This works beautifully, even, or especially, in the chapters analyzing imagined mobility. The intertwined nature of imagined and material qualities of mobility is also demonstrated in many of the other articles, for example by Birgit Braasch, who discusses the material practices of eating on ships and airplanes as constructors of the meanings and images of Atlantic crossings from the 1940s till the 1970s. She also addresses historical change in dominant modes of mobility, another thread running through the entire collection. As Divall points out in his introduction, material change has been, and is, the ultimate reality of mobility. And that makes it such a fascinating subject to historians of technology.