Oliver Whang

The summer​ after my first year at university, I worked in Panama as a research assistant for an evolutionary biologist. We were based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island, which was formed in 1913 when the Chagres River was dammed to help make the Panama Canal. The buildings, clustered on the edge of the reservoir, house a few dozen rotating scientists and...

In​ 1917, the United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the...