Joseph Pennell's Pictures of the Panama Canal

Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
40K words
Chapters
4

Tags

English Originals Painting Engineering FeatPanama CanalConstruction SitesPicture AlbumTransforming NatureIllustrated GuideDocumentary NarrativeVisual RecordEarly 20th CenturyIndustrial Civilization

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Joseph Pennell's pictures of the Panama Canal by Joseph PennellAuthor: Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926,Language: English, Class: TC: Technology: Ocean engineering, Release Date: May 10, 2015

Editor's review

This book is a collection of Joseph Pennell's pictorial record of the Panama Canal, part of the Project Gutenberg free eBook series. Pennell was a prominent illustrator and etcher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; with an artist's eye he captured the machinery, locks, and terrain of the canal project, turning a vast engineering undertaking into a visual text meant to be looked at. For today's readers its value lies not in technical specifications but in the sense of a historical moment: readers can see the visual atmosphere of the canal's construction a century ago and appreciate how an illustrator used line and chiaroscuro to treat an industrial landscape. It suits browsing as visual source material, or extended viewing alongside topics such as Panama Canal history, modern engineering history, and illustration history. Being a public-domain eBook, the text is in English and image quality depends on the specific edition; it is best used for browsing and reference rather than as a systematic engineering commentary.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the list of images, pick out lock, machinery, or terrain scenes to view closely, then return to the textual notes.
  2. Read alongside general histories of the Panama Canal, placing the images within the construction timeline.
  3. Note Pennell's use of line and chiaroscuro, treating the book as illustration-history material rather than an engineering album.
  4. For teaching, select three to five images for visual analysis and discuss how an industrial landscape is rendered artistic.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4

FAQ

Is this book mainly text or pictures? It is a picture collection centered on Pennell's images of the Panama Canal, with relatively limited text. It should be browsed primarily for images, with the text as support; it is not a systematic engineering study of the canal.
Can I read it without background knowledge of the Panama Canal? Yes, but first learn the rough timeline of the canal's construction and the basic concept of its locks; otherwise you may see only scattered scenes. With a brief historical background, the images' historical meaning becomes clearer.
Does image quality in the electronic edition affect reading? Image clarity in public-domain eBooks depends on the specific edition and scan source, and may vary by platform. For research, compare several editions or look for higher-resolution public-domain sources.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926 Author

Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) was an illustrator and printmaker active from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Eleven of his works are held in this collection, spanning art history, book illustration and printmaking technique. He wrote a life of James McNeill Whistler and, with his wife, co-authored travel accounts such as Our Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and A Canterbury Pilgrimage. He also compiled The Illustration of Books and Modern Illustration, systematic discussions of illustrative art, and produced picture series recording the Panama Canal, American wartime work and the "wonder of work." His writing and drawing centre largely on printmaking, illustration and industrial construction, combining reportage with art criticism. Public information is limited, so biographical details are omitted here.