Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

On June 11, 1881, the road was purchased outright by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-océanique for $20 million. Park himself cleared about $7 million on the transaction. Years later, in 1904, when the United States purchased all the holdings of the long-since bankrupt French canal company—its equipment, properties, the unfinished excavatio

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Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some twenty miles closer to the Gulf. It’s been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by a foot. If this is the case, then the threat to New Orleans has grown seven feet higher. “Drive out nature though you will w

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The next month, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, taking out the island’s power grid, water system, and communications. It also exposed the parlous state of affairs in the United States’ largest remaining colony. Although Luis Muñoz Marín’s strategy of using tax loopholes to draw mainland corporations to the island had dramatically improved

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One year after its founding, L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans suffered its first inundation. “The site is drowned under half a foot of water,” Bienville wrote. The settlement would remain submerged for six months. Rather than retreat again, the French dug in. They raised artificial levees atop the natural ones and started cutting drainage channels thr

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